I'm not misinformed. There's an interview with Theo in Youtube (IIRC) that he says "the firmware is merely copied to the device so it's not executed by the CPU".Randicus wrote:You seam a bit misinformed. Binary blobs are not allowed in the OpenBSD kernel or base system. Security is one of the main foci of the system's makers, so hidden code is considered a security risk. Lack of binary blobs is a main cause of some hardware not working with the system. Perhaps you are confusing OpenBSD and FreeBSD? (I do not know if FreeBSD has blobs, but I do know they are more lenient to such things.)WeLoveDebian wrote:The fear that systemd will introduce closed-source binaries? openBSD does that already with it's firmware blobs - Debian don't.
openBSD's policies state that no binary DRIVER should be present in the Kernel. However, non-free FIRMWARE *IS* present.
I have an AMD R9 270X that is bugged as hell in pure GNU systems (Because these don't have the AMD firmware blob). In Debian/Parabola my monitor goes only at 1280x1024 @ 60 Hz, even though it can reach 1280x1024 @75Hz or 1600x1200 @68 Hz. This happens because there is no closed-source firmware loaded.
In openBSD, Arch Linux, Ubuntu, etc, my monitor functions as expected because these vanilla kernels (Linux included) contains formware blobs. In fact, this makes me think why Linux is still licensed under GPL when it has firmware blobs.