Please shutdown this giant thread completely.
I'm near to unsubscribe from list.
Most of subjects you are chattering can be found with web browsing.
Devuan project is very fragile with this behaviour.
El 03/11/17 a les 06:25, Rick Moen ha escrit:
> I wrote:
>
>> As it happens, as I mentioned, I just recently bought (to play with) a
>> reconditioned Zotac CI321 w/4GB RAM and a 64GB SSD for US $125 with 1
>> year warranty from Zotac after John Franklin mentioned the Zotac
>> C-series here. (TY, John!) It has the Intel ME and Intel FSM problems,
>> too.
> [...]
>> The FSP is a separate problem (for both the Purism laptops and my
>> little toy Zotac), and I can't say much about more about that.
>
> I'll do that now.
>
> Long ago, I had a Lucent Silver Wavelan PCMCIA 802.11b wireless card for
> my laptops. At the time, this was the most universally best supported
> wireless chipset ever, using the orinoco_cs driver starting with the
> 2.4.3 Linux kernel. Like all NICs of that generation, the card had a
> built-in ROM that hooked into hardware initialisation.
>
> Newer cards (and motherboard chipsets) have often had hauntingly similar
> functionality to my old 802.11b card, but relegated the ROM
> initialisation to a binary-only firmware BLOB that must be hurled into
> RAM during hardware recognition -- a change made, as far as I can tell,
> just to save a trivial amount of money on ROM costs. It occurred to me
> that the functionality of the new BLOBs and of my old Lucent card's ROM
> contents was the same. In a few cases, the new BLOBs might even be
> exactly the same code, just dd'd to a file from what was formerly burned
> into a ROM.
>
> I sometimes have Richard Stallman as a house guest, and I don't _think_
> I've yet raised this with him, but I keep intending to. So, here's my
> attempt to imagine the conversation:
>
> RM: Here's my point: Why are the firmware BLOBs a software freedom
> issue, and the Lucent ROM was not?
>
> RMS: We at FSF seek freedom to modify in all general-use software, and
> the BLOBs, if they were freed, could give developers ability to
> improve them, the ability to ensure that they are
> freedom-protecting, and the ability to adapt that code to other
> purposes for everyone's benefit.
>
> RM: Sure, but why wasn't that by the same token an issue for the
> Lucent ROM code? And, for that matter, why not CPU microcode?
>
> RMS: Because those are hardware, and you can't change them. Maybe
> one day we'll have full visibility into microcode, but one fight
> at a time.
>
> RM: Fair enough, but are you saying that FSF would have no problem
> with BLOB firmware images if they get burned into ROMs? I'm
> not clear on why that would matter. It's the same code doing
> the same functionality. Also, I'm not sure the ROM code in
> a Lucent Silver could not be changed. Often, these aren't
> classic burn-once ROMs but rather EEPROMs.
>
> RMS: [here, I run out of imagination]
>
> The Stallman in my head _might_ have countered that, well, the frontiers
> of free software (I almost said 'open source') change over time
> depending on what is feasible. Back then, hardware init 'feature' ROMs
> were black boxes and we couldn't reasonably dream of changing that.
> Now, we may have many obstacles, but we can aspire.
>
> Angling back to the Intel Firmware Support Package: In 1997, it never
> would have even occurred to you to object to the (then-current analogue
> of the) Intel FSM as a free software issue, because you'd just call it
> 'the feature ROMs', and it was just an unavoidable black-box feature of
> your computer, like the CPU microcode. Twenty years later, a bunch of
> people see that as an intolerable affront to freedom-respecting hardware
> design, even though nothing has actually changed.
>
> But if that's not a grey area, then I don't know my greyscales.
>
> (In fairness, Libreboot Project clarifies on
> https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel that the FSP handles System
> Management Mode, which raises a genuine security concern, in addition to
> doing 1997-style hardware initialisation. To quote my favourite line
> from 'The West Wing', 'Ah, the rare valid point.')
>
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