I noticed that the Librem 11 uses an Intel AX wifi card. Does it still use the Libre kernel or a blob free varient ? I haven’t seen an Intel AX card working with the libre kernel yet which is what makes me curious.
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I guess they use the same concept as with the Librem 14 and use the firmware jail to get the firmware into the AX card without it touching the OS. AFAIK the kernel interface was always open source only the blob is necessary to be run within the wifi card for it to function correctly.
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Yeah. Speaking as a Librem 5 user who doesn’t have a Librem 11, the more I learn about the firmware jail the more lame it seems.
They say that at least for the Librem 5 modem, overcoming the firmware jail would be illegal in some countries. That might be true, or it might not. I am not a lawyer, but I recall seeing some folks argue about it somewhere.
Basically since it’s illegal to have libre, you have to decide how much libre you want to pretend to have in order to feel good. The goal is surely for you to feel good, and not to solve the problem. Seems like solving the problem would require entering as a combatant into an information war that was lost a long time ago.
Sent from my Librem 5 [from behind the walls of my firmware jail]
Edit:
The opinions expressed here are strictly my own, and are not reflective of anyone else and especially not in any official capacity. Additionally, the may be the result of a machine learning effort to influence my opinions for the purpose of then influencing your opinions to achieve some nefarious end goal plot of which I was not informed.
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Yes, @Manuel is right, the mechanism is the same as Librem 14/Mini with AX200.
PureOS uses the Debian kernel for x86, not Linux-libre. The kernel code including drivers is all free and open source, of course. The card firmware does not run on the x86 CPU, it runs on the card’s embedded processor. This is true regardless of whether the card firmware is held in a file or in a flash ROM chip.
PureBoot’s Firmware Blob Jail just provides the device firmware files for OSes that do not have them (like PureOS), they will be in /run/firmware if you want to see them. The OS kernel passes the contents of that file to the device.
What Linux-libre does is remove the ability to load any device firmware (for most devices, including Wi-Fi cards). Linux doesn’t contain device firmware to begin with (it’s separate), but Linux is able to load the device firmware if it is provided. So if you run Linux-libre, and you choose to provide Intel Wi-Fi firmware, the kernel refuses to load it.
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