Hi Samuel,
The reason I thought of using WebAssembly modules as a distribution method was
that
Linux graphics drivers are seldom as independent of binary blobs as other Linux
drivers. One NVidia card I had had become incompatible with the Linux kernel
during an upgrade despite having worked well for years. Linux has an unstable
ABI so the binary blobs within the closed-source driver didn't have the correct
offsets for the kernel modules after the version 5 kernel update.
Recently, NVidia started embedding RISC-V controllers into their cards so that
the
drivers can be implemented as a simple message passing driver instead of the
elaborate driver designs of the past. This makes their pledges of making closed
source drivers on Linux a thing of the past, a reasonable thing to expect.
I hope that other drivers can become pure open-source as well. With network
adapters, I'm not so hopeful. That's why I think that the binary blobs used by
the network adapter companies are WebAssembly outside the browser. It might not
happen overnight but as WebAssembly compilers become better, perhaps binary
blobs
will become a thing of the past or at least use a common bytecode like
WebAssembly.
Maybe next year the backlash against binary blobs will become sufficient to
adopt
new standards. Until then, I'm looking forward to a Genode PinePhone.
thank you for having taken the time to present the broader picture. Your
motivation becomes much more clear now.
When it comes to the road map for 2023 - covering a time horizon of one
year - these consideration may still remain far out of our view. When
prioritizing how we spend our next 12 months, I think that anticipating
strategic moves of hardware vendors is a risky bet.
Cheers
Norman
--
Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
Genode Labs
https://www.genode-labs.com · https://genode.org
Genode Labs GmbH · Amtsgericht Dresden · HRB 28424 · Sitz Dresden
Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske, Christian Helmuth
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