On Mon, 2012-08-27 at 01:34 +1000, Adam Bolte 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.
But do these graphic card firmwares really see proprietary updates from vendors that modify the behaviour in some useful way? Or is this something you are assuming just because a firmware needs to be loaded at boot, and proprietary graphics card drivers (which include the firmware) regularly get updates? Does requiring to runtime load a binary blob to have access to the GPU qualities of the video card is relevant to the "vendors modifying the behavior in some useful way" context? (I don't know how representative I am, but for some pet-projects of mine, I do care about parallel numerical processing; in the same time, none of my projects require exceptional storage IO performance, thus I I'm totally oblivious to the current status in SDD-es).
Adrian