The Latin American Free Software Foundation has released a fully free version of the Linux kernel 5.16 — Linux-libre 5.16-gnu, stripped of firmware and driver elements that contain non-free components or sections of code limited by the manufacturer. Additionally, Linux-libre disables kernel functions for loading non-free components not included in the kernel delivery and removes references to the use of non-free components from the documentation.
To cleanse the kernel of non-free parts, a universal shell script has been created within the Linux-libre project, containing thousands of patterns to identify the presence of binary blobs and exclude false positives. Ready-to-use patches, made based on the aforementioned script, are also available for download. The Linux-libre kernel is recommended for use in distributions that meet the Free Software Foundation's criteria for building fully free GNU/Linux distributions. For example, the Linux-libre kernel is used in distributions like Dragora Linux, Trisquel, Dyne:Bolic, gNewSense, Parabola, Musix, and Kongoni.
In the release of Linux-libre 5.16-gnu, blob loading is disabled in new drivers for wireless chips (mt7921s and rtw89/8852a), touch screens (ili210x), sound chips (qdsp6), and i.MX DSPs, as well as in device tree files for aarch64 Qualcomm chips. In addition to the proposed system call 'firmware_request_builtin' in Linux-libre, a reverse function 'firmware_reject_builtin' has been introduced. The functions for disabling request_firmware and the _nowarn/_builtin variants have been unified in the code-cleaning scripts.
Source: opennet.ru
