Open Source Intel drivers for Trisquel have blobs ?

5 respostas [Última entrada]
dadix
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Joined: 07/01/2013

I have Intel processor and intel drivers. I read they have blobs on their drivers. I want to know if that blobs were removed in Trisquel.

ssdclickofdeath
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Joined: 05/18/2013

There are no binary blobs in Trisquel, as they are nonfree.

dudeski

I am a member!

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Joined: 07/03/2013

Well, Intel WiFi chips are generally blobbed up somewhere the sun don't shine, but their integrated graphics drivers are fully free. =x

Cyberhawk

I am a translator!

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Joined: 07/27/2010

The kernel of Trisquel, linux-libre, is de-blobbed. So if there are some blobs in any drivers, they are deleted.

If a device is functioning correctly, it means there was no blob needed for it. If a device shows problems, you know it was dependent on a blob to some extent.

GNUser
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Joined: 07/17/2013

Not exactly. While I believe that to be true for most cases, you have to keep in mind that sometimes when you deblob some driver or whatever, you might actually break it only because you forget to clean up the code to work without the blob, and not because it depended on the blob. Like... repair the damage you make when removing a piece of code, you know?
But yeah, Intel works good with free drivers except for wifi. and since they choose to go with vpro, intel is a no-no in my book.

miga
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Joined: 09/17/2011

Typically if a driver gets broken to the point where it doesn't work due to the deblobbing, it would fail to compile as well (at least, I'd hope).

I know that, when compiling Linux-libre, it returns a lot of warnings because of it replacing all the firmware blobs with the */(DEBLOBBED)*/ string, but it still compiles.

For example, my desktop computer has two ethernet ports. Both complain about missing firmware, and return this lovely error in dmesg:
[ 2.913103] r8169 0000:0d:00.0 eth1: unable to load firmware patch /*(DEBLOBBED)*/ (-22)

Yet, I know for a fact the driver works still because for whatever reason, despite missing firmware, both ethernet ports still continue to function. So, I don't really think that deblobbing can break any driver functionality, but I could be wrong as well.