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)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Sunday June 07 2015, @10:30AM
There's a difference between not caring and not realistically being able to do anything about it.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Justin Case on Sunday June 07 2015, @12:06PM
Exactly. There's a thousand things that annoy me about the behavior of lemmings etc. but about the only power I have is to opt out. Go ahead and have your stupid facebook, not for me thank you. But then other people start posting pictures that include me in them, and I'm in FB like it or not. Now you get people who don't know how to email, so if you're not on FB you don't exist to them. Fine. Who needs them? But gradually opting out gets less and less realistic, or even possible. What to do then?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday June 07 2015, @08:22PM
Get important people on a real platform and leave the dead fish in the facebook pool of poor digital hygiene slime.