GNU Linux-libre 5.7-gnu cleaning-up scripts, cleaned-up sources, and cleaning-up logs (including tarball signatures) are now available from our git-based release archive git://linux-libre.fsfla.org/releases.git/ tags {scripts,sources,logs}/v5.7-gnu.
Tarballs and incremental patches were still slowly getting compressed as I started writing this. It took me so long to write this up that by now they are probably ready to be published, along with scripts and logs, at <https://www.fsfla.org/selibre/linux-libre/download/releases/5.7-gnu/>. We will not create or publish binary xdeltas any more: tarballs and patches are now created with git archive and git diff, respectively. So, even if you want a tarball, you don't have to wait for the compression to complete on our end. Update the git repo, and run: git checkout logs/v5.7-gnu && git archive --format tar --prefix=linux-5.7/ \ sources/v5.7-gnu > linux-libre-5.7-gnu.tar && gpg --verify linux-libre-5.7-gnu.tar.sign This will get you the same tarball and signature that, once compressed, will be published at the usual place. Note that the --prefix= was maintained like that of the corresponding upstream release, so that anyone already used to downloading our tarballs and dealing with the unusual prefix doesn't have to make any changes. No changes were required to the cleaning up scripts since -rc7-gnu, already published under the new release procedure, though a little too late for it to be useful. The git repository is already populated with scripts, sources and logs for past releases since Linux-libre became a GNU project; earlier releases might be added at a later time. The imported sources, scripts, logs and signatures are the result of long-time hard work by Jason Self, in the git repo https://jxself.org/git/linux-libre.git. Nearly all of the branches, tags and commits in the new repo are taken directly from there, though I've verified all of the sources/ and scripts/ tags and corrected a few mismatches that AFAICT followed from errors in the SVN repository. The main exception is the storage of logs and tarball signatures; he'd used git notes, but those didn't quite work for me, so I turned them into a separate tree of tags with logs and tarball signatures. Alas, I failed to bring the .log signatures into it. Will fix, and move the tags. The 5.7 upstream release removed the i1480 uwb driver, that we used to clean up, but added a crypto driver for the Marvell OcteonTX CPT, for Mediatek MT7622 WMAC, for Qualcomm IPA, for the Azoteq IQS620A/621/622/624/625 Multi-function device, for IDT 82P33xxx PTP clock, and a Modem Host Interface (MHI) bus driver, all of which required cleaning up. Actually, the MHI bus one is tentative: I couldn't quite figure out what it is that it loads, so I've conservatively blocked it in the likely case it is a piece of non-Free Software. Some further adjustments were required on account of the introduction of the function firmware_request_platform to the firmware-loading interface, of the usual assortment of false positives all over, and blob adjustments in AMD GPU, Arm64 DTS files, Meson VDec, Realtek Bluetooth, m88ds3103 dvb frontend, Mediatek mt8173 VPU, Qualcomm Venus, Broadcom FMAC, Mediatek 7622 and 7663 wifi, silead x86 touchscreen; of the movement of the cleaned-up mscc phy driver (and new blob names in it) and wd719x documentation within the source tree; and of something very unexpected: the introduction of binary blobs as arrays of numbers in source code for gen7 i915 gpus. I unfortunately could not find correspoding sources for the new binary blobs introduced in such an old-fashioned way, and they're big enough and not regular enough that I could just assume them to be data rather than code, so I've removed them. If you come across source code for those bits, or can explain to me how transparent and trivial they are once they're disassembled with existing Free tools, I'll be very glad to restore them. Other relevant changes were made to the deblob-check script: - its self-test now uses a safer $echo instead of echo to feed itself the test patterns, and to complain in case they fail; some of the patterns got mangled (unintended backslash transformations) by /bin/sh's echo in Trisquel 8. That's a well-known shell portability issue that we had a fix for, but that somehow hadn't come up before in the context of the testsuite. - I moved the block of default suspicious patterns after the Linux- or patch-specific ones. This enables these default patterns to be overridden by longer matches (e.g., cleaning up a trailing comma along with the new Intel presumed blobs). In Non-Deterministic Automata-based regular expression engines, such as those in GNU awk and GNU sed, this doesn't make a difference, because the longest match is always preferred, but in engines that process alternatives left-to-right and take the first match, like Python's and Perl's, there was no way to override the blob sequence as needed. Now there is. For up-to-the-minute news, join us on #linux-libre of irc.gnu.org (Freenode), or follow me (@lxoliva) on Twister <http://twister.net.co/>, Secure Scuttlebutt, GNU social at social.libreplanet.org, Diaspora* at pod.libreplanetbr.org or pump.io at identi.ca. Check the link in the signature for direct links. Be Free! with GNU Linux-libre. What is GNU Linux-libre? ------------------------ GNU Linux-libre is a Free version of the kernel Linux (see below), suitable for use with the GNU Operating System in 100% Free GNU/Linux-libre System Distributions. http://www.gnu.org/distros/ It removes non-Free components from Linux, that are disguised as source code or distributed in separate files. It also disables run-time requests for non-Free components, shipped separately or as part of Linux, and documentation pointing to them, so as to avoid (Free-)baiting users into the trap of non-Free Software. http://www.fsfla.org/anuncio/2010-11-Linux-2.6.36-libre-debait Linux-libre started within the gNewSense GNU/Linux distribution. It was later adopted by Jeff Moe, who coined its name, and in 2008 it became a project maintained by FSF Latin America. In 2012, it became part of the GNU Project. The GNU Linux-libre project takes a minimal-changes approach to cleaning up Linux, making no effort to substitute components that need to be removed with functionally equivalent Free ones. Nevertheless, we encourage and support efforts towards doing so. http://libreplanet.org/wiki/LinuxLibre:Devices_that_require_non-free_firmware Our mascot is Freedo, a light-blue penguin that has just come out of the shower. Although we like penguins, GNU is a much greater contribution to the entire system, so its mascot deserves more promotion. See our web page for their images. http://linux-libre.fsfla.org/ What is Linux? -------------- Linux is a clone of the Unix kernel [...] (snipped from Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst) -- Alexandre Oliva, freedom fighter he/him https://FSFLA.org/blogs/lxo/ Free Software Evangelist Stallman was right, but he's left :( GNU Toolchain Engineer Live long and free, and prosper ethically -- If you have a working or partly working program that you'd like to offer to the GNU project as a GNU package, see https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.