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I hesitate to post, but I respect Debian. Firmware has gotten so large, all distributions and OS communities would benefit from focusing on it as a project to p

I hesitate to post, but I respect Debian. Firmware has gotten so large, all distributions and OS communities would benefit from focusing on it as a project to provide free firmware. I don't know how large the firmware developer community is. Firmware space has gotten so large, an entire OS could fit in there. What if there were a miniDebian, or miniFreeBSD, that was a virtuous but smaller reflection of the OS, not unlike iOS and macOS? I'm not sure if crypto or key signing by hw makers, under the excuse of security, makes this impossible, but I'd really like to have more options with the firmware on my machines. Like, why can't I run VMWare ESXi from firmware? It should fit in there. If if is technically possible, it should be allowed; we pay for the hardware, it belongs to us. Why is this even a thing? Who are the bad guys here? Why are they screwing with us?

mschuster91 5y ago
The amount of people capable of doing firmware work is extremely low, and the amount of documentation available that's needed to write firmware for highly embedded systems is even lower - not to mention that the stuff that is implemented in this kind of firmware is extremely complex and if anything RF is involved it gets even hairier because of compliance to standards and legal regulations. Last thing an open source dev wants is complaints from users that their home got raided by the FCC for operating a noisy transmitter that interrupts service for someone else. There isn't even enough manpower to get the Raspberry Pi, the world's most used embedded system for tinkerers, a fully blob-free experience - it's madness to expect that for systems like GPUs that are orders of magnitude more complex than that.