Bug#962134: add Sound Open Firmware
On 6/3/2020 8:31 PM, Paul Wise wrote:
>
>
> SOF is free software, but many devices require binaries that are signed
> by Intel's keys, so the free license/source code much less useful and
> the binaries going into linux-firmware are needed for most people.
>
> More details in the links on this page:
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open
>
> Mark, do Lenovo Laptops require the Intel-signed blobs?
>
Hi Paul - I'm afraid it does (not something of Lenovo's choosing to my
knowledge...).
My understanding is the SOF team didn't want to use intel-firmware but
I'm trying to find the discussion on the SOF mailing list as to why.
I think it was related to there being topology files and debug files and
wanting to keep everything together - and the other two files didn't
belong in intel-firmware.
There were also concerns about it moving outside of their control. Their
solution was the sof-bin repository
(https://github.com/thesofproject/sof-bin)
I have to admit - I hadn't considered the freedoms issues of that.
Is having a sof-firmware repository that is non-free the same way as
intel-firmware? I'm guessing Debian doesn't want to increase the number
of non-free packages?
I know the SOF team wanted to work with Debian on this issue a few
months ago - I will dig up that email and point them at this bug so they
can contribute to the conversation without me muddying the waters about
their decisions (I was on their mailing list but not involved in the
decision making)
Mark
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