On Feb 27, 2009, Richard M Stallman <[email protected]> wrote: > I am looking for firmware released as binaries under a free license. > If someone decompiles such a binary and gives it meaningful function > and variable names, and comments to explain it, that will be free > source code.
> Can anyone recommend a real candidate? The ATI Radeon are probably the most relevant candidates, but it's hard for me to guess how difficult the task would be, since I don't know anything about the actual processors and ISAs involved. e100 might be a simpler task, and nearly as useful: there's some indication in the driver that the processor that runs the microcode is 8086, the microcode snippets are small (limited to 134 32-bit words), and a very large number of Intel chipsets are bundled with network interfaces that require this microcode. Another more challenging piece of firwmare is that for Broadcom Everest network cards, bnx2x driver. It's a pretty large, often-changing chunk of (IIRC MIPS-targeted) management firmware. I have no idea of how widely deployed it is. One that would take a different, more clean-room approach, would be for nVidia video cards. The nouveau project is developing Free in-kernel drivers, not yet integrated in upstream Linux, that currently contain chunks of code obtained by taking MMIO dumps while the non-Free driver was running; the strings are named after 'voodoo', or 'ctx_prog', or 'ctxprog'. Those chunks of code are non-Free and non-distributable AFAIK. However, nVidia cards are quite prevalent, so it would be very useful to be able to use those cards with fully-capable Free drivers. So, reverse engineering and clean-room reimplementation of these chunks of code would be a great accomplishment. -- 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
