Is the Asus KCMA-D8 socket C32 motherboard eligible for FSF certification?
On 04/27/2017 07:30 AM, Patrick 'P. J.' McDermott wrote:
On 2017-04-26 at 15:25, Rene Shuster wrote:
Maybe even FSF-endorsed. Great news! Spread the news.
The H8SCM is a nice find, but unfortunately probably not eligible for
FSF certification.
The board has an old AGP-based Matrox G200eW GPU. In addition to having
a non-free VBIOS [1], the GPU has a "WARP Engine" – a RISC coprocessor
core with non-free microcode (loaded by Linux [2]) to do triangle setup
operations [3].
So, a couple of blobs that would be rather non-trivial to reverse
engineer and replace. The board could surely run headless without them,
but the FSF most likely wouldn't certify it since users could be tempted
to load the blobs to get video output and graphics acceleration.
[1]: https://www.coreboot.org/Board:supermicro/h8scm#Extract_VGA_BIOS
[2]:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/mga/mga_warp.c
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox_G200
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