On 07/12/14 19:53, Kaspars Bankovskis wrote: > On Sun, Dec 07, 2014 at 07:35:03PM +1100, Riley Baird wrote: >> As for why I want to create the distro, I think that OpenBSD has >> excellent security, and I would like to create a version without the >> binary-only microcode included. > > What exactly do you mean by that?
Look in sys/dev/microcode. This is the firmware required for some devices to operate, and is loaded into the device on boot. It is clear that this was not written in assembly; rather, it has been compiled, and we are only getting the output. You could argue that this is better than hardware where the firmware is physically on the hardware, because at least the blobs we load onto the hardware can be reverse engineered, and to a certain degree you would be right. Except nobody actually reverse engineers them. ath9k for Linux has open-source firmware thanks to atheros, and this has actually been modified for various interesting applications.
