Howdy, everyone!

My apologies if this answer is available elsewhere, but I haven't been able to find it. I'm trying to better understand Armbian's policy toward closed-source components. Discussions on closed-components often times get confusing because "component" is overloaded, so I'm separating "components" into several categories:

1. Firmware/microcode that is loaded into hardware but never executed by the operating system itself

2. Drivers that operate in kernel space (often called "binary blobs")

3. Software that runs in user space

4. Firmware for "autonomous subsystems" or "coprocessors" like the Intel Management Engine or ThreadX on the Raspberry. (This is technically part of #1, but I'm asking about it separately because I'm curious and corprocessors are weird :-P )

Does Armbian include any of these closed source components? If so, which ones? In which images? Is it possible to look at the download for particular SBC and figure out whether it includes any of these?

Thank you for your time. Sorry again if this is answered somewhere already. I haven't seen it anywhere and was looking for an authoritative answer.

Peace.

Blobs are going to be firmware blobs https://github.com/armbian/firmware and sometimes things to make uboot work. Like the arm trusted firmware things i dont understand.

 

Some "legacy" labeled kernels  containing bsp kernels may have some blobs and things for acceleration.

 

The intent is as little as possible and especislly with our mainline kernel based builds.

 

There's not a simple answer to your question.

 

Older Allwinner and Rockchip based images will have higher potential levels of purity.  

 

Dig in and share your conclusions