[HH] proprietary CPUs

[Bill Bogstad]

On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 1:53 AM, Federico Lucifredi <flucifredi at acm.org> wrote:
>
> On May 25, 2012, at 4:00 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
>
>> Federico Lucifredi wrote:
>
>
>> (This is one of the reasons you can't run FreeBSD on
>> consumer routers.)
>
> Do you have a specific example? I wonder if there is more than video that is proprietary (and FreeBSD would run headless… I wonder where is the problem getting it to run on an ARM chip… probably more than the SoC in that case.

I suspect Tom was thinking about the prevalence of binary blobs for
wireless chips rather then video in this case.   Consumer router
manufacturers who do provide the Linux source for their software never
seem to provide the wireless drivers in source form.   Broadcom is
frequently the wireless chip manufacturer when this happens.

Bill Bogstad