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A comment on System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open-Source Firmware. Parent comment

Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by pgeorgi on Thursday October 10, 2019 @04:30PM (#21218846)
AMD GPUs require AtomBIOS which contains bytecode (that is: blobs) to initialize the GPU. If you look at the Linux drivers, they come with an AtomBIOS bytecode interpreter for that purpose.

There was some confrontation over that 10 years ago or so (see radeon vs. radeonhd drivers, one point of view is described at https://libv.livejournal.com/27799.html) and the people in charge of Linux GPU drivers decided to go with AtomBIOS.

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Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by yellowapple on Thursday October 10, 2019 @05:23PM (#21219322)
> AMD GPUs require AtomBIOS which contains bytecode (that is: blobs) to initialize the GPU. If you look at the Linux drivers, they come with an AtomBIOS bytecode interpreter for that purpose.

I'm failing to see how this is any worse than the current situation with Nvidia drivers, especially if System76 is preinstalling them. You'll need blobs either way. You'll arguably need far more of them for an Nvidia GPU than an AMD GPU.

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Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by fulafel on Friday October 11, 2019 @02:45AM (#21222101)
ACPI also works this way, no?
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Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by pgeorgi on Friday October 11, 2019 @08:38AM (#21223714)
Right, but ACPI has a standard (even if using the standard has onerous restrictions) and so firmware projects like coreboot can (and do) implement their own.

For AtomBIOS, you have a single vendor virtual machine environment (bytecode + semantics) describing whatever they need in a custom form. There's no other documentation for the things out there than AtomBIOS speciment, making reimplementation rather complex.

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