kernel-libre (hopefully 100% Free) for Fedora 8 and rawhide

Alexandre Oliva aoliva at redhat.com
Sun Mar 30 06:37:59 UTC 2008


On Mar 25, 2008, Dave Jones <davej at redhat.com> wrote:

> The kernel team is already buried alive in backlogs of bugs.  This
> serves to do nothing but introduce new failure modes unless it's
> done properly.  Hence my concern.

Honest question: what failure mode would you find it easier to
recognize, "module not present" or "module loads but doesn't work"?

I'm asking because I'm working on software that may simplify my life
of maintaining patches for kernel-libre for Fedora.

Removing entire files has been the practice of people who started
these efforts (not for Fedora) a long time ago, but this creates some
pain in dealing with patch files that later attempt to modify these
files in harmless points, especially while tracking the rc/git stuff
in rawhide.

OTOH, removing only the blobs from the source code would be relatively
easy to do now, with deblob-check (URL below), but then the modules
could still be enabled, still compile, but not quite work inasmuch as
the blobs are necessary for proper functioning.
http://www.fsfla.org/svn/fsfla/software/linux-libre/

I'd probably keep on disabling these modules as useless in my own
builds, but people might re-enable them, as they might appear to be
available and even compile correctly.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}




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