firmware-nonfree VS linux

Added nexmon firmware patch bcm43430a1/7_45_41_46 in an attempt to support RPiZ2Ws that use the RPi3 wifi chip (see https://github.com/RPi-Distro/firmware-nonfree/issues/23 for further information)

Rather than downloading the new driver from a random google drive (Step 1), I went to the source on GitHub: https://github.com/RPi-Distro/firmware-nonfree/raw/buster/brcm/brcmfmac43455-sdio.bin

The main issue I ran into was Wi-Fi support. The Pi Zero 2 requires firmware from the Raspberry Pi firmware repository in order to get access to the wlan0 interface. Found here: https://github.com/RPi-Distro/firmware-nonfree/tree/buster/brcm

I managed to get this working by copying the files from this repository to the /lib/firmware/brcm directory: https://github.com/bsdkurt/brcm-supplemental They are renamed files from the official Raspberry Pi repository for non-free firmware: Source Location: https://github.com/RPi-Distro/firmware-nonfree/tree/master/brcm Renamed to be board specific and set ccode=X2: brcmfmac43436-sdio.raspberrypi,model-zero-2-w.bin brcmfmac43436-sdio.raspberrypi,model-zero-2-w.clm_blob brcmfmac43436-sdio.raspberrypi,model-zero-2-w.txt

The directory for these files is /lib/firmware/brcm. You will need to download the brcmfmac43456 version of those three files available at https://github.com/RPi-Distro/firmware-nonfree/tree/master/brcm or grabbing from a working PiOS. But Kali will still try to load the brcmfmac4345 ones, so you need to rename the brcmfmac43456 to change that 6 to a 5.

FFS predates FreeBSD and is in some capacity supported by all 3 major BSDs. I'm fairly confident that Linux actually supports it through the ufs driver ( https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/fs/ufs ); whether the use of different names in different places makes it better or worse is an exercise for the reader.

These are a bit easier to see what's going on:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/d5cf50dafc9dd5faa1e...

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/d5cf50dafc9dd5faa1e61...

Unfortunately Github doesn't have a way to render symbols for whitespace, but you can tell by selecting the spaces that the previous version had leading tabs. Linus changed it so that the tokens `default` and the number e.g. `12` are also separated by a tab. This is tricky, because the token "default" is seven characters, it will always give this added tab a width of 1 char which makes it always layout the same as if it were a space no matter if you use tab widths of 1, 2, 4, or 8.

There was also a Gentoo effort to run atop FreeBSD[0]. The challenge of course is that afaik none of the BSD kernel ABIs are considered stable. The stable interface is the BSD libc. That said, with binfmt_misc, I don't see a reason you couldn't just run (at least some) FreeBSD binaries on Linux with a thin syscall translation layer (rather something like qemu-system) and then your layer hooked via binfmt_misc. I'm not aware of anyone who has done this for FreeBSD, but prior efforts existed as alternate binfmts for SysVr4/5 ELF binaries[2]. Either way would take some elbow grease, but you *might* even be able just reuse binfmt_elf and just have a new interpreter for FreeBSD elf.

[0] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_FreeBSD

[1] https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/binfmt-misc.html

[2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/binfmt_elf....

> The original less-than check was deemed incorrect

It was only deemed incorrect because of an information leak. Not because it's a valid use-case for user space to copy smaller portions of *hwrpb into user space. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/21c5977a836e399fc71...

Correct. And the combined work needs to carry the MIT license text and copyright attributions for the MIT software authors. With binary distribution it must also be overt, not hidden in some source code drop, but directly accompanying the binary.

Many people who talk about relicensing never credit the MIT developers or distribute the MIT license text. "Because it's GPL now."

I don't think that you believe that, but many developers do.

Some don't see the need for source code scans for Open Source compliance, because the license.txt says GPL, so it's GPL. Prime example is the Linux kernel. There is code under different licenses in there, but people don't even read https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/COPYING till the end ("In addition, other licenses may also apply.") and conclude it's simply GPL 2 and nothing else.

Also be aware that sublicensing is not the same as relicensing.

> Does he have something against it?

He notoriously hates GNU Emacs, yes.

https://marc.info/?m=122955159617722

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...

So If we would only count code and not comments, it is only 9489 LoC Rust. Which would be about 0.03% and if we take all lines and not only LoC it would be around 0.05%

[0] https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b401b621758e46812da...