On Jan 28, 2009, Rubén Rodríguez Pérez <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm reviewing the linux-libre list of changes, to see if any of them can > be done by removing the non-free parts instead of the whole files.
It's been a while since we stopped removing whole files. Unless deblob-check is missing, that is. Running deblob-<kver> without deblob-check will remove files after a warning, and this seems to catch a lot of people off guard. I'm thinking maybe we should only run without deblob-check if a command-line option is provided or some such. > As many drivers cover several devices, some of them may work. The one > I'm currently reviewing is the ATI radeon (and r128) driver. Odd that you should mention it. Earlier this week, I modified the way we handle these in the SVN version of deblob-2.6.28. With the changes I made, it will fail to initialize and probably not work at all. If you have the time to experiment with *not* triggering such a failure, I'd be glad to lend you a hand. That said, I very much doubt radeon will actually work with any 3D acceleration without the removed firmware or Free reimplementations thereof. It may be worth a try, though. Just make sure (somehow) that you don't have remnants of non-Free firmware in the not-quite-volatile memory of the video card. Like, power off the machine if you ever had a kernel that may have loaded the non-Free firmware into the device, to make sure it's not working just because it's still there. Even without the kernel radeon driver, the X radeon driver actually works for me, even with 2D acceleration, at least with the oldish radeon card on my home firewall/gateway/server. I hope this helps. Let me know how it goes, and if you need any help, you can use this list, or get ahold of me (lxo) on #linux-libre at irc.freenode.net > Someone at this forum said that this parser can be avoided via a (less > powerfull) MMIO method, thus providing 3D support for ATI cards in the > linux-libre kernel, which would be great. I'll ask this person about it. Hmm, interesting, I hadn't realized that. This would indeed be awesome. That said, it's probably the kind of change that would probably make more sense to try to integrate upstream first. The idea of accummulating and maintaining patches for actual functionality (rather than mere removal of non-Free stuff) is a bit scary to me, considering that I'm not much a kernel developer. (or at all ;-) Thanks in advance for looking into this, -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Gandhi Be Free! -- http://FSFLA.org/ FSF Latin America board member Free Software Evangelist Red Hat Brazil Compiler Engineer _______________________________________________ linux-libre mailing list [email protected] http://www.fsfla.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linux-libre
