OpenBSD Journal

KernelTrap interviews Jonathan Gray and Damien Bergamini

Contributed by dhartmei on from the blob-busters dept.

Jeremy Andrews of KernelTrap writes in his Interview: Jonathan Gray and Damien Bergamini
Jonathan Gray and Damien Bergamini recently worked together to develop the nfe driver to support NVIDIA Ethernet controllers. In this interview, they talk about OpenBSD's policy to not ship binary-blobs, explaining the problems associated with drivers that use these blobs and the affect these types of drivers have on the open source community. They also detail the efforts involved in writing the nfe driver, describing why they started the project, how they were able to support undocumented hardware, and the features supported by the new driver.

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Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.213.240) on

    Interesting contrast with the recent "Should Linux Use Proprietary Drivers?" Slashdot article. While it wasn't a scientific survey or anything, it sure looked like proprietary drivers have the overwhelming (although not unanimous) support of the Linux-using Slashdot community.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (66.11.66.41) on

      Keep in mind, posters on slashdot tend to be the stupidest linux users. Linux users with a clue have all been chased away by the idiots there.

      Comments
      1. By Shane J Pearson (202.45.125.5) on

        > Keep in mind, posters on slashdot tend to be the stupidest linux users. Linux users with a clue have all been chased away by the idiots there.

        Ssh! Don't alert them to their own stupidity! They might come here to escape it! Or worse still, the lists.

        If we don't say any more, they might hopefully stay at /. and in IRC.

      2. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.217.43) on

        Perhaps, but they probably represent the unwashed masses. The impression that even most open-source OS users do not oppose binary drivers takes almost all the pressure off ATI and nVidea to release specs. In the current environment, it will never happen.

        Perhaps smaller companies that want to break in to the video card market will be more accomodating ... assuming such companies exist. OpenBSD otherwise has little hope of ever having 3d acceleration (even 'theoretical' 3d acceleration based on binary blobs which most of us wouldn't touch on bet!).

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (70.27.15.123) on

          OpenBSD could have hardware 3d anytime someone wants to do it. There's open source drivers for intel graphics chipsets, and a reverse engineered driver open source driver for ATI cards.

          Comments
          1. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.217.43) on

            Better than nothing -- but I don't have too much confidence in Intel as a saviour (i.e. will they release documentation for their next chipset??). I'd still really like to see some Asian companies will start releasing semi-competitive chipsets ... with documentation ... and get some more alternatives out there. Competition might eventually shake things loose.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (128.171.90.200) on

      Was it referencing this article ?

      Comments
      1. By Matthias Kilian (84.134.0.115) on

        It's sad that terms like "improvement", "bug fix" and "quality" aren't mentioned in that zdnet article. So people will still not understand what's bad about blobs.

  2. By Anonymous Coward (128.171.90.200) on

    I like the side-by-side format of the article.

    Of course if you are using lynx, you probably have no idea what I am talking about.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (68.100.130.21) on

      I'm using w3m and I found it really annoying. Having to scroll back and forth, back and forth, sucks... and I can't read two separate paragraphs at once, so I don't see what the point was.

      Comments
      1. By tedu (69.12.168.114) on

        > I'm using w3m and I found it really annoying. Having to scroll back and > forth, back and forth, sucks...

        read jsg, push home, read damien.

        > and I can't read two separate paragraphs at once, so I don't see what
        > the point was.

        the question was only printed once, saving electrons.

  3. By Damon McMahon (58.104.119.82) damon.mcmahon@gmail.com on

    This was a most excellent article.

    Both authors gave concise and articulate reasoning for why driver blobs are bad news for everyone who even pretends to give a damn about the security, stability and long-term viability of their hardware platform of choice.

    As others have noted, it was in stark contrast to some of the supposed linux fan-boys on the recent slashdot article who have no problems running blobs if it means they get to run the latest and greatest hardware. This attitude is so glaringly lacking in any backbone or principle, they are an embarassment to their open-source "community" and should feel ashamed.

    It's also good to see another Aussie developer making valuable contributions to the OpenBSD code base, go Jonathan!!

  4. By Venture37 (217.22.88.123) venture37 # hotmail com on www.geeklan.co.uk

    thanks for clearing up how you write code which gets released under the BSD license from reading GPL'd source code.

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