Matthew Garrett @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer
Public

Hello! Because I clearly hate myself I have written about some of the tradeoffs involved in allowing non-free blobs of code to be updated at runtime and published it on the internet: codon.org.uk/~mjg59/blog/p/to-

To update blobs or not to update blobs

A lot of hardware runs non-free software. Sometimes that non-free software is in ROM. Sometimes it’s in flash. Sometimes it’s not stored on the device at all, it’s pushed into it at runtime by another piece of hardware or by the operating system. We typically refer to this software as “firmware” to differentiate it from the software run on the CPU after the OS has started1, but a lot of it (and, these days, probably most of it) is software written in C or some other systems programming language and targeting Arm or RISC-V or maybe MIPS and even sometimes x862.

codon.org.uk · Matthew Garrett's Blog

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