GNU Linux-libre 5.9-gnu

[Alexandre Oliva]

GNU Linux-libre 5.9-gnu cleaning-up scripts, cleaned-up sources, and
cleaning-up logs (including tarball signatures) are now available from
our git-based release archive git://linux-libre.fsfla.org/releases.git/
tags {scripts,sources,logs}/v5.9-gnu.

Tarballs and incremental patches are still getting compressed; when
ready, they are all going to be at published along with patches at
<https://www.fsfla.org/selibre/linux-libre/download/releases/5.9-gnu/>.


The scripts used for the release candidates needed changing for final: a
new blob name was added to x86 touchscreen, and a new bitmap console
font added as an array of numbers elsewhere was flagged as suspicious,
but it was a false positive.

Aside from that, there haven't been a lot of surprises in this release.
A new wifi driver for rtw8821c, and a new SoC support driver for
MediaTek mt8183 needed some cleaning up to disable requests for blobs.
Other pieces of code and documentation mentioning blobs moved about in
the tree and required adjustments to the cleaning up logic.  Preexisting
drivers for amdgpu, mt7615, and i915 (CSR), Mellanox mlxsw (Spectrum3),
and r8169 (rtl8125b-2) needed changes to clean up blobs for
newly-introduced hardware variants.


Some people seem to have got the notion, from the 5.8-gnu release
announcement, that we were moving away from GNU awk or GNU sed, and
towards Python and Perl.  I'd like to dispell any such misunderstanding.

We've long had deblob-check backends in all four of these languages, and
GNU awk remains the most efficient to verify entire tarballs, while
Python remains the most efficient to clean up individual files.

It just so happens that problems were found while benchmarking, that
affected only some of the back-ends, and I mentioned those problems were
fixed, and that I'd like to avoid regressions in the back-ends I don't
use much.


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Be Free! with GNU Linux-libre.


What is GNU Linux-libre?
------------------------

  GNU Linux-libre is a Free version of the kernel Linux (see below),
  suitable for use with the GNU Operating System in 100% Free
  GNU/Linux-libre System Distributions.
  http://www.gnu.org/distros/

  It removes non-Free components from Linux, that are disguised as
  source code or distributed in separate files.  It also disables
  run-time requests for non-Free components, shipped separately or as
  part of Linux, and documentation pointing to them, so as to avoid
  (Free-)baiting users into the trap of non-Free Software.
  http://www.fsfla.org/anuncio/2010-11-Linux-2.6.36-libre-debait

  Linux-libre started within the gNewSense GNU/Linux distribution.
  It was later adopted by Jeff Moe, who coined its name, and in 2008
  it became a project maintained by FSF Latin America.  In 2012, it
  became part of the GNU Project.

  The GNU Linux-libre project takes a minimal-changes approach to
  cleaning up Linux, making no effort to substitute components that
  need to be removed with functionally equivalent Free ones.
  Nevertheless, we encourage and support efforts towards doing so.
  http://libreplanet.org/wiki/LinuxLibre:Devices_that_require_non-free_firmware

  Our mascot is Freedo, a light-blue penguin that has just come out
  of the shower.  Although we like penguins, GNU is a much greater
  contribution to the entire system, so its mascot deserves more
  promotion.  See our web page for their images.
  http://linux-libre.fsfla.org/

What is Linux?
--------------

  Linux is a clone of the Unix kernel [...]

(snipped from Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst)

-- 
Alexandre Oliva, happy hacker
https://FSFLA.org/blogs/lxo/
Free Software Activist
GNU Toolchain Engineer