A Thread about the roam:Free Software Foundation 's silly roam:Respects Your Freedom certification process and the silly outcomes that it drives. Folks get really weird about firmware blobs, but hardware needs initialization code and these hardware manufacturers aren't providing the source code for them, so rather than literally never shipping hardware, FSF has provided a bunch of workarounds that let you declare your device is Free Software -supporting is to hide all the proprietary bits in a place where the end-user cannot possibly reverse engineer or improve them.
RYF instead says you must hide and bury any firmware you end up having to have. And so roam:Purism end up having to do utter nonsense, like using a secondary CPU core to load the DDR4 controller firmware into the hardware, just so they can claim the binary blob is elsewhere.
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Keep in mind this isn't even about the secondary (or main) CPU running the firmware. The firmware is always run by an embedded processor in the DDR4 PHY anyway. This is just about having the main CPU never even see the firmware. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
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So it doesn't matter that the DDR4 controller firmware has access to all RAM and obviously can pwn the main CPU at will. As long as you bury it in read-only memory, and make sure it never is accessed by the main CPU, the FSF will give your product their meaningless rubber stamp.
What if the firmware is backdoored? Who knows! You're not supposed to touch it from the main CPU, lest you get digital cooties (eeeeeeeew). Just don't think about it. Move on. Everything's Libreβ’ (except the parts you can't see). It'll be fine.
Frankly, I think this is the sort of embarrassing double-speak which is used to undermine the goals of the movement and to excuse the sort of corporatism which is common in other parts of the open-license ecosystems.