Introducing the Librem 11

[gondolyr]

Nicole Faerber has addressed this topic a few times and she does not personally agree with the FSF’s
stance, at least at the time of writing.

Questions on Bluetooth

Yeah, hmm… very unsatisfactory, totally get it. The only kind of solution I can offer is to install the binary firmware for the ar3k Bluetooth part, I’m sorry. The problem is with the FSF and the PureOS endorsement which we have not been able to straighten out. We must not include any blobs in PureOS and we must not endorse any sources that would carry such blobs. While I understand the goal of it and also support that this puts us into a very VERY difficult situation - and this Bluetooth issue…

AMD, ECC and Purism

While I in general agree to the sentiment, but microcode is starting to get touchy So in general speaking a kind of red line is where the binary actually gets executed. Does it get executed by some MCU on some peripheral? Or does it get executed by the main CPU that is also running the OS? The latter for me is pretty much unacceptable since this can have severe security implications. Some $mystery code could do anything, in general I can not review and audit it (of course to some extend …

Edit: Here are some more posts Nicole has made with regards to RYF:

AMD, ECC and Purism

So, well, we had this discussion already and I fail to see the point in doing such drastic things. It does not help anything or anyone except to keep the FSF endorsement for the OS. Everything else is just made worse by it. Hardware cost will rise, it is a significant development effort and in the end it does not create any benefit at all: The blob is still a blob and even worse, it gets taken out of the control of $average user since it is hidden in some hardware subsystem. This is neither help…

Free firmware for intel wifi cards

This is not entirely true. The ATH9k is based around a Tensilica Xtensa core and has a firmware, but this firmware resides on chip and not as blob in userspace. The Ar3k, which is the Bluetooth part, does not require a firmware but a rather small parameter blob. It can also use an external firmware to update parts of the built-in ROM (often called “RAM patch”) but that’s not strictly necessary. Also the parameter block is not strictly necessary. I once patched the load of it out of the kernel a…

VisionFive 2 RISC-V

So, first of all, thank you for bringing this up Actually I also have ordered one of the VisionFive2 boards and am already tinkering with it. I already previously got myself a THEAD T810 board (that’s by Alibaba) and a SiFive’s Unmatched. The problem with the T810 and the Unmatched was, while these were already nice boards for Linux development, the CPUs/SOCs on them were not really available for custom designs - and their performance was still, well, not great. The JH7110 by StarFive i…