Norbert Tretkowski wrote: > * Nathanael Nerode wrote: >> I unflagged it and built my own kernel, and it appears to work just >> fine. >> >> Perhaps Debian should allow it to build; the card is rather common. > > Mr. "binary firmware is evil", s/evil/non-free/, please.
> did you realize that the advansys > driver contains a small firmware blob? No, in a word. Thanks for pointing it out. (Actually, it contains at least three moderately large microcode blobs.) That's one thing which makes this stuff so annoying; it's not immediate or trivial to find all the embedded binary microcode in the kernel, or even in a particular file. I certainly can't claim to have found all the "contaminated" files. * Since I actually have an advansys card to test on, I should be able to convert this driver to userland firmware loading without the annoyances of a remote testing cycle. * The advansys driver is licensed under a very permissive non-copyleft license which doesn't require distribution of source. This makes it the first driver I've found with binary microcode which is actually licensed correctly! Hooray for that! This means I would be entirely comfortable making a package for non-free to contain the microcode. Actually, thanks for pointing this out; I now have a new project which should be significantly less frustrating than the other firmware-separation projects. :-) -- This space intentionally left blank.