Now, if the latter approach (mangling blob names in the request, but not in the source code per se) is acceptable, an even simpler approach might work: one with even greater odds of being accepted upstream: introducing some means for userland to tell the kernel which pieces of firmware are available, so that the kernel does not even ask for those that aren't.
I don't see how that helps. Whether Linux gets a list of available firmware from a certain directory or in some other way, the issues remain (1) what it does when it wants a firmware program that is not present and (2) whether the source code shows the name of that firmware program. I've been thinking about these options because AFAICT distros such as Fedora are leaning towards offering users more choice as to which pieces of firmware to install, what licenses to use, etc, but they're planning to do so in userland: the userland hotplug script called by the kernel to load a piece of firmware would obtain information about it from configured repositories and offer users (or not) the choice of installing it if it's not installed yet. I don't see that this makes any difference. I don't see that it would affect anything for Linux Libre. Regardless of precisely how it will deal with the case where Linux asks for a nonfree firmware program, what we want to do is stop that from happening at all. -- Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org