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ARM is even worse when it comes to binary blobs. Take a look at any major SoC out there and you will see BLOBs for the LAN and graphics interfaces. Occasionally

• justin66 14y ago
  I'm sure that's true but it's important to keep one thing in mind: not all binaries are the result of an Nvidiaesque attempt to keep from open-sourcing something. Loading updateable binary microcode to implement an ISA is often a beneficial processor design technique and it dates back to seventies. There's some irony in the OpenBSD objection to handling binary blobs. A lot of the cool old systems OpenBSD supports are LOADED with microcode and ROM the user can never see or understand. It's hidden. To a degree this is even true in the case of the everyday AMD64 machine (which loads microcode updates and some of its boot logic from BIOS ROM/EFI, thank you). OpenBSD's position, in conjunction with its support of these systems that load all that stuff from ROM at boot time and its lack of support for the ones without a proper ROM to store the stuff (raspberry pi, for example), keep it from having to handle these blobs personally. The principle involved here isn't "let's shun the use of binaries for which we don't have the source code." The principle is "binaries are yucky, don't get any on you." It's not hugely impressive.