linux open firmware,Firmware/Open

There are number of open firmware projects, some of which are listed below.

While all the firmware below is open source, some of it uses read-only firmware embedded in ROM chips and some of the read-only firmware does not have freely licensed public source code. Some of the devices in this situation do not have enough RAM that they could completely avoid the read-only firmware in the ROM chips.

Booting

Project

Debian package

Description

Comment

initialising computers from reset

initialising computers from reset, used on ARM a lot

UEFI

hardware support not packaged in Debian

Embedded controllers

Project

Debian package

Description

Comment

Chromebooks

AR100 OpenRISC EC in Allwinner ?SoCs

Keyboards

Project

Debian package

Description

Comment

Network

Project

Debian package

Description

Comment

BCM5719 firmware reimplementation

Radio

Project

Debian package

Description

Comment

Broadcom/AirForce chipset based WiFi devices

Qualcomm Atheros AR7010 and AR9271 USB based WiFi devices

requires binutils/GCC patches

Atheros AR9170 based WiFi devices

not built from source in Debian; needs sh-elf toolchain, no patches needed

Conexant based WiFi devices

no longer developed, Subversion repository was lost, only a snapshot of the code remains

GSM devices

not suitable for end users, only researchers

Audio

Project

Debian package

Description

Comment

various Intel audio devices

most devices that can run SOF require Intel signatures on the binaries (1 2 3 4)

Visual

Project

Debian package

Description

Comment

?ColorHug family of open display colorimeter hardware

Requires a proprietary toolchain to build

Misc

Project

Debian package

Description

Comment

misc firmware gathered by Linux developers

not built from source in Debian

Cypress FX/FX2 code library

Cypress FX2(LP) based logic analyzers