Re: Intel microcode fixes [OFF-TOPIC]
Philip Blundell (philb@gnu.org)
Sat, 21 Nov 1998 11:59:19 +0100
>Calm down. Imho, nobody (not even OS vendors) know or care what is in those
>"microcode fixes". Intel gives everybody a binary "blob" and OS puts it
>where needed. Of course, anyone can use it to his advantage, e.g. putting
>the blobe only in OS release > X.Y and thus forcing customers to use that
>release (or risk missing something very important in those "blobs") or say
>"such and such OS has this blob and Linux does not, so...". The interesting
>dilema is whether these blobs can go into the official kernel or not. Since
>there would be no such thing as "source"; for the microcode itself *is* a
>source so applying GPL to it is like multiplying a vector with identity matrix
We already have binary-only driver firmware in the kernel. But microcode
updates themselves probably belong in user space, or at the most as a
separately distributed module. You could always create /dev/microcode and let
root cat files to it.
p.
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