On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 09:29:19AM +1000, Adrian Colomitchi wrote:
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?
That is indeed one of the key points of this argument. Is the firmware sufficiently complex that it actually dictates how the device will be used (as opposed to simply getting it to function)? If the firmware isn't actually modifying the device behaviour in some way that the manufacturers decide what is best for the user, this would put the firmware on a similar level to the keyboard controller previously discussed. Unfortunately I do not have those technical details, but I have seen no evidence to suggest otherwise at this point (but still a lot of fuss over this issue). SSD manufacturers get to control whether the user can utilise TRIM, wear-leveling algorithms to increase the product life, SMART functionality, etc. all presumably via firmware. These are all optional features, where the SSD would work perfectly fine for its primary purpose - storage - without these. I cannot immediately think of parallels in the case of graphics firmware. AFAICT, it's simply a case of graphics acceleration (the primary use of such devices) being unable to function if you don't have the firmware - which again would explain why the firmware is so small - with all the important functionality defined in the free software drivers. -Adam