[Matthew Garrett] > The biggest area which is likely to bite us is with network cards, > though we'll probably lose some degree of SCSI support as well.
Fortunately, at least with SCSI, users have a choice. They can buy Adaptec or LSI 53c* and they get _truly free_ firmware (in the case of Adaptec, the kernel includes firmware source and a matching assembler; for LSI, the firmware is augmented with byte-code "scripts" apparently assembled by the driver at runtime). Perhaps coincidentally, between aic7xxx, aic79xx and sym53c8xx_2, the most popular commodify SCSI chips are covered. (Well, there's the megaraid family, but those don't _appear_ to need to load firmware at runtime either.) Incidentally, the aic7xxx / aic79xx drivers in particular are a great thing to point out to people who are inclined to be lenient toward vendors on the theory that it is inherently not practical for them to ship open source firmware for their devices. Adaptec figured out how to do this a _long_ time ago: $Id: aic7xxx.reg,v 1.4 1997/06/27 19:38:39 gibbs Exp $ $Id: aic7xxx.seq,v 1.77 1998/06/28 02:58:57 gibbs Exp $
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
