Re: [lemote] Re: Build farm down / building fuloong farms (was: Re: [loongson-buildfarm] build farm down ?)

[Richard Stallman]

    Brett or someone else better at legal than me: how much if at all a
    problem is this? I vaguely recall issues in some cases with
    distributing nonfree software even if it isn't used; but that may only
    have been if the software was on FSF servers.

We certainly don't want the blob to be included in the version of the
Yeelong that we recommend to people.

    On IRC today, Philippe told me that he tried quickly to disable the
    VGA console in PMON, but that a lot of the nice barriers that are
    supposed to modularize PMON were not respected in code that was added
    to support the fuloong and yeeloong (eg the diff between upstream PMON
    2000 and the version that works on the Lemote boxes), so actually
    removing the VGA console support and related blob may be difficult (at
    least for someone who hasn't worked with that code a lot - perhaps it
    would be easier for whomever did the Lemote changes in the first
    place.)

I don't understand this very well, but it seems to me that replacing the
blob with a table of all zeros cannot possibly break any machine that
doesn't use that blob.

Anything fancier is just an optimization or an improvement in elegance.
It could be nice, but it can be postponed if it is inconvenient to do.