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The stance on non-free stops me from using it. Amdgpu is open source down to and including the Linux kernel. But each card has a couple of kilobytes of binary f
by JonChesterfield 4y ago
The stance on non-free stops me from using it. Amdgpu is open source down to and including the Linux kernel. But each card has a couple of kilobytes of binary firmware file, so no deal.
That firmware could literally ship on the card totally invisibly and that would be fine for guix, but because it can be patched in the field, no.
I don't get it.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoFor the record, vega10 has almost 2 MiB worth of firmware after extracting: # du -bs gpu/ 2053094 gpu
- JonChesterfield 4y agoOk, s/k/m. I remembered small and didn't check. Doesn't change the underlying point though - so what? The same guys who shipped the silicon also shipped some magic numbers with it. If you trust one, may as well trust the other, since they're equivalent.
- kuramitropolis 4y agoOne is immutable, one isn't.
- speed_spread 4y agoThey shouldn't ship at all on any CPU arch that uses microcode since it's also just closed firmware blobs!
- JonChesterfield 4y agoI'm a little confused how x64 gets away with this. Do they just stubbornly use whatever microcode was on it when the system switched on?
- Avshalom 4y agoUnfortunately yes. The nonfree channel linked in this thread does/has microcode updates but mainline guix doesn't.
- nextaccountic 4y agoThat's just.. so counterproductive. They are ok with proprietary software, but only if they come builtin. But there are some spectre and meltdown mitigations that comes with CPU microcode, right? It's probably not a great idea to not apply microcode updates in this case