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Intel Skylake & Broxton Graphics Processors To Start Mandating Binary Blobs

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

kaszz writes:

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: 4, Informative) by frojack on Sunday June 07 2015, @04:40AM

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday June 07 2015, @04:40AM (#193143) Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday June 07 2015, @03:06PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday June 07 2015, @03:06PM (#193269) Homepage Journal

    Presumably the closed-source software writers have to negotiate for whatever license they need.