Re: Exist operating systems that ship without blobs?

[Petar Bogdanovic <petar%smokva.net@localhost>]

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 10:53:21AM -0500, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 04:00:25PM +0100, Martin Husemann wrote:
> > 
> > > If yes, because?
> > 
> > You would either have to redo all the firmware yourself or drop support for
> > that device.
> 
> Never mind that OpenBSD's position is basically horseshit: they have not,
> after all, removed support for all devices which *have onboard firmware
> for which no source code is supplied*.

Not sure that's really their position, see below.

  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=143355112811564&w=2 wrote:
  >
  > The kernel includes a few minor firmwares which are FREELY PROVIDED
  > by the vendors of that hardware, since those vendors chose to not put
  > those firmware onto ROMS on their cards.
  >
  > (...)
  >
  > If the hardware exists, we load [the firmware] onto the hardware.
  >
  > (...)
  >
  > 99% of the hardware we run on contains firmwares *IN ROM*.
  >
  > (...)
  >
  > Looking forward to your complete rewrite of the Broadcom NetXtreme II
  > 10/100/Gigabit firmware, by the way.  There are about 25 versions of
  > this product, and they have 4-6 MIPS 64-bit cpus running different
  > firmwares on them.  Total size, around 260K.  It's like a bunch of
  > independent operating systems running on propriety hardware!