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Intel has often been portrayed as the golden child within the Linux/BSD 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?
Time to revive the Open Graphics Project...?
(those binary blobs may contain root kits)
Original Submission
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @03:34AM
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't licences grant you a right-to-use, and provisos such as "you cannot do such-and-such" only apply to right to such usage? What's to stop someone reverse-engineering but never "using" the software in question? Or reverse-engineering at all? Of course, if one does reverse-engineer the code, publishing the findings may fall foul of something else in terms or copyright or legality (I don't know how fair-use for compatibility purposes etc. comes into this), but publishing is a different issue.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday June 07 2015, @03:43AM
I'm thinking along the same lines.
"These firmware files are explicitly closed-source licensed and forbid any reverse-engineering."
Why does anyone give a damn about the vendors forbidding anything? Alright, I can understand that a corporation might legitimately be forbidden from exploiting another corporation's work, especially for profit. That WAS the original idea behind copyrighting, to prevent other people from using your work for their own profit.
The rest of us? Private users, non-profit organizations, people who just want to use the stuff they have bought and paid for? Reverse engineer everything to hell and back, and use what you've learned to your best advantage.
I don't give a small damn what Intel thinks I should or should not be doing with the hardware that I have purchased. I simply don't care. The courts shouldn't care either. Screw Intel, and any other corporation that believes it has some "right" to forbid people from understanding how the hardware works.
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Sunday June 07 2015, @04:40AM
There is an interesting passage in the intel license terms on this cpu:
Limited patent license. Intel Corporation grants a world-wide,
royalty-free, non-exclusive license under patents it now or hereafter
owns or controls to make, have made, use, import, offer to sell and
sell ("Utilize") this software, but solely to the extent that any
such patent is necessary to Utilize the software alone, or in
combination with an operating system licensed under an approved Open
Source license as listed by the Open Source Initiative at
http://opensource.org/licenses. [opensource.org] The patent license shall not apply to
any other combinations which include this software. No hardware per
se is licensed hereunder.
They never address closed source operating systems.
https://01.org/zh/linuxgraphics/intel-linux-graphics-firmwares [01.org]
I believe they have used that same text for open source for some years now.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday June 07 2015, @03:06PM
Presumably the closed-source software writers have to negotiate for whatever license they need.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Sunday June 07 2015, @04:19AM
This is known as the Chinese wall approach and was used to reverse engineer the Intel BIOS by Compaq: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall#Computer_science [wikipedia.org]
Still always moving