Re: [gentoo-dev] [PATCH] Add deblob support only for python3

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Fri, 23 Jul 2021, Alice  wrote:

> On 7/23/21 6:04 AM, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
>> Maybe this is a stupid question, but what is USE=deblob doing these days
>> anyway? I thought that all nonfree firmware had been removed from the
>> kernel tree (with version 4.14) and was provided separately by the
>> sys-kernel/linux-firmware package?

> There are still users that want a full libre(deblob) kernel.
> There are also distributions built around libre(deblob) kernel.
> deblob is still removing many modules from the kernel that are non-free
> you can see for exemple is removing things also on most recent kernels
> https://www.fsfla.org/svn/fsfla/software/linux-libre/releases/tags/5.13-gnu/deblob-5.13

I know, but I still wonder what it actually does. I've checked the first
10 or so files in their list, and they all say in their header that they
are under a free software license. So does that mean the license info in
these files is wrong? If not, then why is the script touching them?

Also, (e.g.) this:

| announce MICROCODE_INTEL - "Intel microcode patch loading support"
| reject_firmware arch/x86/kernel/cpu/microcode/intel.c
| clean_blob arch/x86/kernel/cpu/microcode/intel.c
| clean_blob arch/x86/events/intel/core.c
| clean_kconfig arch/x86/Kconfig MICROCODE_INTEL
| clean_mk CONFIG_MICROCODE_INTEL arch/x86/kernel/cpu/microcode/Makefile

IIUC, it will disable CPU microcode updates. The code being removed is
entirely free (but it could load some non-free third-party microcode).
Do we really endorse that, from a security (spectre, meltdown, etc.)
point of view? Note that the ex-factory microcode of these CPUs is
already non-free, so arguably rejecting updates for it doesn't change
anything.

Ulrich