The kernel ships without any proprietary code

Feb 28, 2017 02:33 GMT  ·  By

Alexandre Oliva from the GNU Linux-libre project, a non-profit organization chartered to develop and promote a deblobbed and libre Linux kernel, announced the general availability of GNU Linux-libre 4.10.

Based on the recently released Linux 4.10 kernel, the GNU Linux-libre 4.10 kernel is here for users who want 100% freedom when using a GNU/Linux operating system. As such, it ships without any proprietary code by deblobbing various drivers which introduced new blob requirements, especially the GPU ones.

"There's one new driver (st_fdma) that requires blobs, and one removed driver (STE-Modem) that used to require them," said Alexandre Oliva. "GPU drivers remain as the most frequent offenders for new blobs: i915, adreno, amdgpu and radeon all introduced new blob requirements for (presumably) previously-unsupported hardware variants."

Various text files have been moved to the Documentation subtree

Besides the usual deblobbing changes implemented in the GNU Linux-libre 4.10 kernel, the developers also inform OS integrators who want to ship this 100% free kernel version on their GNU/Linux distros that the README and other text files have been moved into the Documentation subtree, which is very important for building.

Other than that, GNU Linux-libre 4.10 adds a pattern that catches iwlwifi blob name prefixes, along with various other under-the-hood improvements. Of course, it also inherits all the new features of the upstream Linux 4.10 kernel, including the virtual GPU support and better writeback management.

If you want to use a 100% free kernel on your Linux-based operating system, feel free to download either the source of binary packages of GNU Linux-libre 4.10 from our website or the official homepage of the project, where you should find all the information you need to get started compiling this Linux-libre kernel.