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On Wednesday, March 12, 2025 12:11:37 AM Mountain Standard Time Andrey Rakhmatullin wrote:
As has already been mentioned, nothing of substance has changed since Debian >held a GR on this issue. However, if down the road open hardware with free >firmware became more widely available (I’m looking at you, RISC-V, although
I understand that the most likely short-term outcome is that companies will >produce non-free firmware for their RISC-V processors), then it might be >worth reopening the issue for consideration.
That's just processors though, and processors usually contain their
non-free firmware anyway. The original issue was about hardware that
doesn't contain firmware but wants it loaded from the OS.
That’s a good point. RISC-V isn’t only being used as main CPUs, but also for all types of
other things that require firmware. For example, Western Digital is spending effort to
bring RISC-V to their storage controllers.
https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-source/
The salient point is that the open hardware movement is just in its infancy and it is going
to be a long time before there are common production machines that can run securely
and well without the need to use and update proprietary firmware.
RISC-V has the potential to replace a lot of the current ARM micro controllers. RISC-V uses
a permissive license, somewhat akin to the Apache 2.0 License in the sense that anyone
who builds upon it can decide if they want the outcome of their work to be open or closed.
So, some RISC-V chips will ship with open hardware schematics and information and
others won’t. In addition, even if someone chooses to ship open hardware RISC-V, that
doesn’t mean they will provide the source information for the corresponding firmware, so
you could end up with a situation where there is an open hardware chip running non-free
firmware.
But it is a beginning, and some day we will probably see wireless chips and ethernet chips
and GPUs and TPMs and everything else shipping open hardware running open firmware.
At that point, it will be easy to advocate for installers that match.
Of course, there is nothing preventing companies from adopting free and open firmware
running on closed hardware. That is the current situation for most if not all of the free
firmware currently shipping in Debian. But my personal opinion is that the free firmware
movement won’t take off without the open hardware movement.
--
Soren Stoutner
soren@debian.org
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<body><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">On Wednesday, March 12, 2025 12:11:37 AM Mountain Standard Time Andrey Rakhmatullin wrote:</p>
<br /><p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> >As has already been mentioned, nothing of substance has changed since Debian</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> >held a GR on this issue. However, if down the road open hardware with free</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> >firmware became more widely available (I’m looking at you, RISC-V, although</p>
<p style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-left:0;margin-right:0;">> >I understand that the m