On Wed, 2020-06-03 at 21:34 -0400, Mark Pearson wrote:

> Hi Paul - I'm afraid it does (not something of Lenovo's choosing to my 
> knowledge...).

Interesting, is it Intel doing the restrictions on Lenovo hardware?
ISTR reading on one of the bugs that some hardware doesn't have the
restrictions, so it is strange that Intel restricts some hardware
vendors but not others. If you are able to push back on these Intel
restrictions, it would be very much appreciated.

> My understanding is the SOF team didn't want to use intel-firmware but 
> I'm trying to find the discussion on the SOF mailing list as to why.

I'm not sure what you mean by intel-firmware. Based on the Repology
website I guess you mean the Intel CPU microcode, which is shipped in
Debian in the intel-microcode package.

https://repology.org/project/intel-firmware/packages
https://repology.org/project/intel-microcode/packages

> I think it was related to there being topology files and debug files and 
> wanting to keep everything together - and the other two files didn't 
> belong in intel-firmware.

Since intel-firmware is mostly about CPU microcode, I agree that SOF
doesn't belong in the intel-firmware/intel-microcode packages.

> There were also concerns about it moving outside of their control. Their 
> solution was the sof-bin repository 
> (https://github.com/thesofproject/sof-bin)

OK, I guess that this repository should be packaged in Debian non-free. 

I am surprised that they created a new repo instead of using upstream
linux-firmware repository, I guess they wanted more control though.

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/

This is going to be annoying because it means that every distro has to
package sof-bin instead of just updating their linux-firmware package.

> I have to admit - I hadn't considered the freedoms issues of that.

It is seriously annoying, since it means you can't fix bugs and then
immediately test them, you have to go through Intel SOF releases.

> Is having a sof-firmware repository that is non-free the same way as 
> intel-firmware? I'm guessing Debian doesn't want to increase the number 
> of non-free packages?

Debian is generally pragmatic about including new non-free packages,
where it is necessary, someone who cares will usually end up doing it.
We would obviously prefer everything to be fully free software, but we
don't live in an ideal world so we make do with what we get. So a new
sof-bin package (sof folks should rename that to sof-firmware-signed)
should be fine to include in Debian. Hopefully someone will also
package a build of the firmware source code for folks who can run
unsigned or debug firmware builds.

> I know the SOF team wanted to work with Debian on this issue a few 
> months ago - I will dig up that email and point them at this bug so they 
> can contribute to the conversation without me muddying the waters about 
> their decisions (I was on their mailing list but not involved in the 
> decision making)

Interesting, thanks for that.

-- 
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

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