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by detaro 2143 days ago
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...
1 comments

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)