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posted by CoolHand on Sunday June 07 2015, @03:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-intel-ligence dept.

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)


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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday June 07 2015, @04:29AM

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday June 07 2015, @04:29AM (#193141) Journal

    Linux is a big enough part of Intel's market for some classes of machines that they may notice a chill in the air if nobody came to their party.
    I don't know if this processor is aimed at the server market though. It sort of seems like a graphics workload is more what it is aimed at.

    You would think Intel would understand that this is just about the worst time to start requiring blobs.

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  • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Sunday June 07 2015, @06:10AM

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Sunday June 07 2015, @06:10AM (#193157) Homepage Journal

    Intel has *already* done this. GMA 500/PowerVR chipsets which caused Linux no end of issues. A lot of netbooks shipped with that GPU and ran Linux poor, and the Windows GPU driver was of questionable quality as well.

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    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Fledermaus on Sunday June 07 2015, @06:38AM

      by Fledermaus (1913) on Sunday June 07 2015, @06:38AM (#193161)

      I got bitten by one of those. Out of habit, I trusted Intel's name for not having any issues with linux. A mistake I'm not making again :P

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @09:02AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @09:02AM (#193182)

        who worked for Intel. It's even more nightmarish when they have the AMD is teh suckz mentality.

        The whole computer industry went to shit when Intel was able to stop licensing their socket/FSB tech. It's too bad AMD didn't make a push to get all of the non-Intel processor developers to standardize on an alternative FSB before they went to the integrated memory controllers. Or hell, made their memory controller/socket tech royalty free (within the bounds of their own IP ownership.) Maybe then we wouldn't be in this mess.

        Meantime I suppose there is nothing left to do other than hope that ARM SoCs don't follow suit, the RISC-V chips turn the industry on its head, or AMD stays the course or becomes more open regarding their own binary-only VBIOS modules so everybody with an understanding of the consequences will jump ship to AMD at least enough to put them into the black.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @08:51PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @08:51PM (#193370)

          The ARMs SOCs mostly use closed piece of crap accelerators, so sorry, ARM is there already.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Sunday June 07 2015, @09:05AM

        by kaszz (4211) on Sunday June 07 2015, @09:05AM (#193183) Journal

        What brand and model will it be next the time?