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Intel Skylake & Broxton Graphics Processors To Start Mandating Binary Blobs
An anonymous reader writes: Intel has often been portrayed as the golden child within the Linux community and by those desiring a fully-free system without tainting their kernel with binary blobs while wanting a fully-supported open-source driver. The Intel Linux graphics driver over the years hasn't required any firmware blobs for acceleration, compared to AMD's open-source driver having many binary-only microcode files and Nouveau also needing blobs — including firmware files that NVIDIA still hasn't released for their latest GPUs. However, beginning with Intel Skylake and Broxton CPUs, their open-source driver will now too require closed-source firmware. The required "GuC" and "DMC" firmware files are for handling the new hardware's display microcontroller and workload scheduling engine. These firmware files are explicitly closed-source licensed and forbid any reverse-engineering. What choices are left for those wanting a fully-free, de-blobbed system while having a usable desktop?
That would be because any modern operating system (including most linux distros) uses 3D acceleration on a graphics card to put windows on a screen.
An open source GPU: https://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor
And its wiki: https://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor/wiki
And even some peer-review: http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~millerti/nyami-ispass2015.pdf
We could have fixed this problem a decade ago if the FOSS community had gotten behind the Open Graphics Project, but they're not as interested in FOSS-friendly graphics as they say they are. This is because most FOSS enthusiasts are more interested in gratis than they are in freedom.
Exactly. I get a very strong feeling that a lot of people don't know what they're talking about here. There are "binary blobs" that are actually drivers or libraries used by drivers that get executed on your workstation's CPU and there are "binary blobs" that are just microcode that run on your graphics card / wifi NIC / sound card / whatever. I'm not in favor of the first type, but the second type is really not a big deal. Very few nontrivial chip designs exist these days without some sort of microcode.
Nobody gets upset about the microcode that lives in ROM in the hardware, but if you have a driver that loads the microcode, suddenly everybody loses their shit. Microcode is *everywhere* and it's very rare that you ever get to see it.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
They aren't "mandating" anything.
They are virtually a monopoly, certainly a cartel. Different rules apply.