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

coreboot

ITP 381727

initialising computers from reset

u-boot

u-boot

initialising computers from reset, used on ARM a lot

rpi-open-firmware

initialising Raspberry Pi devices from reset

was briefly stalled, toolchain not upstreamed

TianoCore

src:edk2

UEFI

hardware support not packaged in Debian

Embedded controllers

Project

Debian package

Description

Comment

CrOS EC

Chromebooks

crust

ITP 979326

AR100 OpenRISC EC in Allwinner ?SoCs

Keyboards

Project

Debian package

Description

Comment

ZMK

QMK

TMK

Radio

Project

Debian package

Description

Comment

OpenFWWF

Broadcom/AirForce chipset based WiFi devices

open-ath9k-htc-firmware

firmware-ath9k-htc

Qualcomm Atheros AR7010 and AR9271 USB based WiFi devices

requires binutils/GCC patches

carl9170fw

firmware-linux-free

Atheros AR9170 based WiFi devices

not built from source in Debian

Prism54 FreeMAC

Conexant based WiFi devices

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

OsmocomBB

GSM devices

not suitable for end users, only researchers

Audio

Project

Debian package

Description

Comment

Sound Open Firmware

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

colorhug2-firmware

?ColorHug family of open display colorimeter hardware

Requires a proprietary toolchain to build

Misc

Project

Debian package

Description

Comment

linux-firmware

firmware-linux-free

misc firmware gathered by Linux developers

not built from source in Debian

fx2lib

Cypress FX/FX2 code library

fx2lafw

sigrok-firmware-fx2lafw

Cypress FX2(LP) based logic analyzers

embeds copy of fx2lib


CategoryHardware