Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Fri, 1 Apr 2016 18:47:04 -0300
Felipe Sanches <address@hidden> wrote:

> This sounds pretty much non-sense to me. Maybe we have incompatible
> definitions of what "firmware" means. So, to make my point clear, by
> "firmware" I mean bare-metal software. That is... very low level
> software that runs on the CPUs or microcontrollers of an electronics
> board. And yes firmware can be free software. Libreboot is one famous
> example of free firmware (in particular, bootcode).
That is a good definition indeed that fits the most common kind of
firmwares I can think of.

With regard to firmwares types and software freedom we have:
- 100% free software boot fimrwares like libreboot.
  It initialize enough hardware, to be able to load GNU/Linux. It does
  some very complicated stuff like initializing the RAM that Linux
  doesn't do.
- Peripherals fimrwares. We have several free software fimrwares that
  respectively targets a particular chip. A very famous one is the
  ath9k_htc one which was liberated by the chip vendor thanks to
  people and companie(s) that worked to make it happen.

Denis.

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