Stefan Sperling <s...@stsp.name> wrote: > On Wed, Feb 20, 2019 at 03:54:29PM +0100, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > > Nor does OpenBSD prefer free firmware over non-free firmware in any way. > > That's not quite true. Non-trivial effort was spent to make our > athn(4) driver work with open source firmware for its USB devices, > and to cross-compile these firmware images in our ports tree. > That is a better alternative to using a closed binary firmware image. > > Research into how the world could make more vendors provide source code > to their firmware images would be welcome :) Seems to be a hard problem.
I don't believe any of this. When writing drivers, having software may or may not help. As the complexity goes up, source code helps less and less. Go look inside X, where having the software is helping less and less. In drivers, what matters is *clear and documented interfaces*, then the job can get done. If we had to work from first-principles in every driver, we would be nowhere. Who today thinks a SATA or EHCI isn't a cpu running a firmware. They used to be hardwire products but newer models were replaced with cpu+software variations because it was easier for the hardware vendors to build that way. What matters to us, and allows us to build drivers for such components, is *published specification of operation*. Open source firmware? Give me a break, a lot of people are talking about things they don't know anything about.
