e100: eth1: e100_request_firmware: Failed to load firmware "e100/d101m_ucode.bin": -2
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From: John Hasler on 28 Sep 2009 12:43 I wrote: > Not true. Many drivers include sourceless binary blobs. Aragorn wrote: > Those would not be in the vanilla sources as supplied by Linus through > kernel.org, or at least, not insofar as I myself have seen. Look in linux-2.6.31.1/firmware/ -- John Hasler jhasler(a)newsguy.com Dancing Horse Hill Elmwood, WI USA
From: Mark Hobley on 28 Sep 2009 13:08 In comp.os.linux.networking Aragorn <aragorn(a)chatfactory.invalid> wrote: > I'm afraid that statement is built upon a contradiction in terms. There > is no such thing as "non-free blobs and firmwares included in the > mainline kernel". > The mainline kernel - i.e. the vanilla kernel as > supplied by Linus Torvalds & friends - is completely GPL'ed and > contains no binaries or firmware whatsoever, *because* it's GPL'ed. > > Such binary blobs and firmware are added only at the distribution level, That is not entirely true. There are binary blobs in the form of embedded swirmware and hexcoded instructions in some of the drivers provided in the kernel source tarball. These are not executed directly by the central processing unit, but are passed as raw instructions to the attached hardware. There is no human readable source for some of these swirmware instructions, (and their operation is not documented), so these is considered to be a non-free (by Richard Stallman's definition) component by some organizations. Some organizations remove these components to give a clean derivative. Mark. -- Mark Hobley Linux User: #370818 http://markhobley.yi.org/
From: John Hasler on 28 Sep 2009 13:35
Mark Hobley writes: > There is no human readable source for some of these swirmware > instructions... Though it may not heve been written in C it is very unlikely that those programs were written directly in binary or hex. The manufacturer of the device has the source but they refuse to release it. -- John Hasler jhasler(a)newsguy.com Dancing Horse Hill Elmwood, WI USA |