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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: 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?

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