GNU Linux-libre 5.9-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}/v5.9-gnu.
Tarballs and incremental patches are still getting compressed; when ready, they are all going to be at published along with patches at <https://www.fsfla.org/selibre/linux-libre/download/releases/5.9-gnu/>. The scripts used for the release candidates needed changing for final: a new blob name was added to x86 touchscreen, and a new bitmap console font added as an array of numbers elsewhere was flagged as suspicious, but it was a false positive. Aside from that, there haven't been a lot of surprises in this release. A new wifi driver for rtw8821c, and a new SoC support driver for MediaTek mt8183 needed some cleaning up to disable requests for blobs. Other pieces of code and documentation mentioning blobs moved about in the tree and required adjustments to the cleaning up logic. Preexisting drivers for amdgpu, mt7615, and i915 (CSR), Mellanox mlxsw (Spectrum3), and r8169 (rtl8125b-2) needed changes to clean up blobs for newly-introduced hardware variants. Some people seem to have got the notion, from the 5.8-gnu release announcement, that we were moving away from GNU awk or GNU sed, and towards Python and Perl. I'd like to dispell any such misunderstanding. We've long had deblob-check backends in all four of these languages, and GNU awk remains the most efficient to verify entire tarballs, while Python remains the most efficient to clean up individual files. It just so happens that problems were found while benchmarking, that affected only some of the back-ends, and I mentioned those problems were fixed, and that I'd like to avoid regressions in the back-ends I don't use much. 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, happy hacker https://FSFLA.org/blogs/lxo/ Free Software Activist GNU Toolchain Engineer -- 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.