[Gllug] TFT Monitors

[Russell Howe]

On Thu, Jan 11, 2007 at 12:43:08AM +0000, Nix wrote:
> On 9 Jan 2007, Mike Brodbelt verbalised:
> > Nix wrote:
> >> A lot of binary modules are also immense monstrous lumps outmassing all
> >> the rest of the kernel put together: this has detrimental effects on
> >> icache hit rates and thus, er, slows the kernel down.
> >
> > A lot of in general, or nVidia in particular :-)
> 
> It is definitely the worst case. I dunno what they're doing in there
> but surely there's no excuse for keeping *that* much code in kernel

Other examples, almost certainly not as big as nvidia's, but for what
they're driving, almost certainly an order of magnitude bigger than they
need to be:

Unicorn ADSL chipset (used on the Bewan PCI cards and perhaps others)

-rw-r--r-- 1 rhowe staff 648K 2004-02-26 16:29 unicorn/arch/i386/modem_ant_PCI_LINUX.o
-rw-r--r-- 1 rhowe staff 720K 2004-02-26 16:29 unicorn/arch/i386/modem_ant_USB_LINUX.o

That's a binary blob included in the driver download


Madwifi (driver for the Atheros 802.11g chips).

Excerpt from the makefile:

(obj)/hal.o:
        {UUDECODE} ${HAL}/public/${TARGET}.hal.o.uu

referencing this:
-rw-r--r-- 1 rhowe staff 213K 2005-02-22 14:17 madwifi/hal/public/i386-elf.hal.o.uu

Considering a good chunk of the madwifi driver /is/ open source, and the
above is only a part of it...

/lib/modules $ find . -name '*ath*' -ls
235050  160 -rw-r--r--   1 root     root       162564 Apr 10  2005 ./2.6.11.6-xianlu/net/ath_hal.ko
235051    9 -rw-r--r--   1 root     root         8520 Apr 10  2005 ./2.6.11.6-xianlu/net/ath_rate_onoe.ko
235058   57 -rw-r--r--   1 root     root        56392 Apr 10  2005 ./2.6.11.6-xianlu/net/ath_pci.ko


Sangoma S518 PCI ADSL card driver:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 282K 2006-07-14 19:20 wanpipe/patches/kdrivers/src/net/wanpipe_adsl.gcc3.i686.o

(Sangoma will at least support it, and recompile it using whatever
combination of GCC, arch and kernel version you ask for)

Theo de Raadt might grate at times, but OpenBSD's stance on binary
blobs is commendable and one I'd wholeheartedly support.

If anything, I'd say that the GPL is less amiable to linking in binary
blobs than the BSD licence, but no doubt that's been debated to death
elsewhere (and even if gllug wishes to debate it again here, I might
just sit & watch :)

-- 
Russell Howe       | Why be just another cog in the machine,
rhowe at siksai.co.uk | when you can be the spanner in the works?
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