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I'm no expert and can't examine all the bits in detail, however, I trust the likes of FSF and Stallman. So far, they haven't given approval to any laptop built after mid 2000s. I wonder why.

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In our case, I didn’t kick off the process because I would have to send a free laptop to the FSF and we can’t afford that yet. Maybe later.

Also I’m not sure what the stance of RYF is regarding controller (non-CPU) firmware, as iMX8M needs a blob _in_ the DDR4 controller PHY.

The Librem folks added a read-only flash for the PHY code - apparently firmware that can't be updated is "part of the hardware" for RYF: https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-solving-the-first-fsf-ryf-hurd...

Points for creativity, but in my opinion this borders on rule-lawyering with not much benefit. The code that tells the ARM/M4 to load stuff from that SPI flash can be easily changed, it's in the bootloader, so it can change that code before putting it into the DDRC.

Yeah, I found that a pretty odd design choice (and tbh also not sold on a blanket "proprietary firmware is better if it can't be changed" angle)

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