[Bluerise]

I'm sorry, but that is wrong.

The main blobs are being run on the GPU, as bootloaders, even before the actual operating system is loaded. OpenBSD does not need to run _any_ blob itself.

There used to be a 3d graphics driver blob, but afaik that got open sourced. Also, if you don't do 3d, you wouldn't even need it.

[tedunangst]

So, to summarize, if somebody makes a port that doesn't use a blob, all is good. The question seems to be not so much if the blob runs before or after OpenBSD, but whether we would need to distribute it. If it's in the ROM, then this isn't even a question. But if it's something we are expected to write to the flash drive, that's a potential problem. Anyway, the question isn't very interesting given that the magic porting elves haven't yet gifted us with an OpenBSD RPi port.

I don't know exactly what the situation is. Don't care. I have a BeagleboneBlack if I wanted to watch the paint dry doing a build. :)

[LukeShu]

What's OpenBSD's policy on when something needs to be included?

The rPi boot process requires several files to be on a FAT partition on an sd-card: bootcode.bin, fixup.dat, start.elf, config.txt and the OS kernel; the first 3 of which are blobs.

Would those blobs need to be included, or would OpenBSD be fine saying "use your existing boot card, just drop in our kernel", or "go grab these files from https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/tree/master/boot when formatting the sd-card."?

[tedunangst]

If the blobs are preexisting that's less of a problem. But it also makes the hardware less interesting.