Comment by cherryteastain
9 months ago
This is also the case with mainline linux though. Good luck using Nvidia graphics with only FOSS components.
Even more FOSS friendly graphics vendors like AMD and Intel rely on binary firmware.
9 months ago
This is also the case with mainline linux though. Good luck using Nvidia graphics with only FOSS components.
Even more FOSS friendly graphics vendors like AMD and Intel rely on binary firmware.
Laptops, desktops, smartphones or tablets are closed source hardware with closed source firmware in general. There are products marketed as if they're open source devices which are in fact closed source hardware with almost entirely closed source firmware. The software on top being open source is frequently misrepresented as the device itself being open source, which isn't the case. Not shipping important firmware updates in the OS provides assurance of insecurity while not changing the fact that the hardware and firmware is closed source. It has to do with a loophole defined in a certain ideology around software, not open hardware or privacy/security.
Indeed, mainline linux distros aren't free software either
I have run nvidia cards without proprietary drivers for years. Nouveau.
With the right hardware choices running blob-free linux is pretty straightforward.
> Nouveau.
Which Nvidia card do you have, and at which clock speed does your GPU run?
> With the right hardware choices running blob-free linux is pretty straightforward.
Unfortunately no. Features like SSE are pretty amazing and have made CPUs really fast and efficient, but they're unfortunately also large attack vectors, so vulnerabilities like Spectre or Meltdown occur. You need proprietary microcode blobs to fix those security vulnerabilities in your CPU.
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