On 26/08/12 10:04, Ben Finney wrote:
The border that is contentious is where we find devices designed to have their behaviour modified, but in a rather limited way and through tightly restricted channels – such as upgrading the firmware at boot time or run time from a binary blob.
Do Intel CPUs count as that with the microcode driver in the kernel which lets a user space app update their firmware? samuel@eris:~/Downloads/linux$ grep microcode /var/log/syslog Aug 27 09:52:13 eris kernel: [ 15.351781] microcode: CPU0 sig=0x1067a, pf=0x80, revision=0xa07 Aug 27 09:52:13 eris kernel: [ 15.356422] microcode: CPU1 sig=0x1067a, pf=0x80, revision=0xa07 Aug 27 09:52:13 eris kernel: [ 15.358127] microcode: Microcode Update Driver: v2.00 <tigran@aivazian.fsnet.co.uk>, Peter Oruba Aug 27 09:52:13 eris kernel: [ 15.400007] microcode: CPU0 updated to revision 0xa0b, date = 2010-09-28 Aug 27 09:52:13 eris kernel: [ 15.411190] microcode: CPU1 updated to revision 0xa0b, date = 2010-09-28 I guess it's a grey area, they work without that, but may not work as well.. Some useful background: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Microcode cheers, Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC