Re: [gNewSense-users] KFV Flow

[Peter Lutz]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 4:11 PM, Brian Brazil <address@hidden> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 9:18 PM, Sam Geeraerts <address@hidden> wrote:

I've tried to update the KFV flow chart with recent insights from discussions on this mailing list. I hope it gives a reasonably accurate view of reality. I'm sorry if it looks kind of messy, I'm not used to working with Dia. Comments and suggestions are very much welcome of course.

I also apologize for my lateness. Taking an interest in libre software and seemingly being the only one in town who is knowledgeable about computers is time consuming. :) I hope it can still be useful.

You're missing the step to check for sourceless blobs, which is one of the key things we care about.

Brian

Sorry for my total ignorance, but how does one identify a sourceless blob? It it just going to look like a series of hexadecimal numbers like this (taken from drivers/atm/atmsar11.data):

  0x401a6800,
  0x00000000,
  0x335b007c,
  0x13600005,
  0x335b1000,
  0x3c1aa0c0,

 

or this (taken from drivers/char/dsp56k.c):

static char bootstrap[] = {
    0x0c, 0x00, 0x40, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00,
    0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00,

 

I took both of those examples from files listed in Blag's deblob script at http://www.blagblagblag.org/pub/BLAG/linux/kernel/v2.6/deblob/deblob-2.6.24.4.1, which Brian linked to in his recent "State of deltah" message. I'm assuming not all files with hexadecimal are non-free binary blobs, so how do we know if it's non-free? Both of the files I cited above claim to be licensed under the GPL, which makes things even more confusing. Anyone want to clarify all this for me? :-)

Peter