Ancestors

Written by 翠星石 on 2024-12-12 at 11:13

Someone just let me know the latest proprietary software addition to Linux huh?: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/iio/proximity/aw96103.c#n122

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Written by Alexandre Oliva (moving to @lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br) on 2024-12-12 at 12:10

why do you say that's software?

it doesn't look like software to me.

it seems more like configuration data.

but sometimes it's hard to tell.

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Written by 翠星石 on 2024-12-12 at 12:18

@lxo Generally, configuration data would at least come with documentation as to what the format is and details of the current configuration - but that is lacking.

Actually reading the other parts of the file, it seems to be magic register/value pairs for init, but it's just as easy to write data to registers than to write quite a few CPU instructions to a memory location via registers and then execute that.

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Toot

Written by Alexandre Oliva (moving to @lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br) on 2024-12-13 at 16:25

unfortunately linux is a common offender in accepting undocumented magic numbers

but magic numbers aren't always code

my concern is whether the numbers amount to code, because that matters for GNU Linux-libre. whether that code is encoded as an array of bits or as constants scattered over generated or manually-written code, if it's a disguised program without source code, under an obnoxious license or otherwise disrespectful of user freedom, we don't want to keep it. but if it's declarative data, we tolerate it even if it is undocumented.

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