Few days ago the Latin American Free Software Foundation published (with a slight delay) the new completely free version of the Linux kernel 5.14, «Linux-libre 5.14 ″ which is a kernel stripped of firmware elements and drivers that contain non-free components or code fragments whose scope is limited by the manufacturer.
Linux-free is the kernel recommended by the Free Software Foundation and a main piece of the GNU distributions totally free of proprietary fragments or included firmware in Linux they are used to initialize devices or apply patches to them that solve hardware failures that could not be corrected before being made available to users.
In addition, Linux-libre disables kernel functions to load non-free components that are not part of the kernel provisioning and removes the mention of the use of non-free components from the documentation. To clean the kernel of non-free parts, a universal shell script was created as part of the Linux-libre project, containing thousands of templates for determining the presence of binary inserts and removing false positives.
The Linux-libre kernel is recommended for use in distributions that meet the Free Software Foundation's criteria for building totally free GNU / Linux distributions. For example, the Linux-libre kernel is used in distributions such as Dragora Linux, Trisquel, Dyne: Bolic, gNewSense, Parabola, Musix, and Kongoni.
Main new features of Linux-libre 5.14
In this new version that is presented from Linux-Libre 5.14 stands out for including several cleanup scripts that have been modified in a very significant way since the last -rc on controllers and subsystems and with which blob loading is disabled in the new version in newer eftc and qcom arm64 drivers, in addition to the i915 cleaning part it is mentioned that it was adjusted due to a renamed file, while for drivers for sp8870 and other av7110 cards they moved up the tree and the cleaning had to be adjusted. New blob names were also found in btrtl, amdgpu and adreno and have been cleaned up from the kernel code.
Separately, it is observed that there have been code changes to clean up the microcode for x86 systems, as well as removing previously skipped blobs in components to load microcode for systems powerpc 8xx and in micro-patches for firmware for svs6624 ensoresas it is mentioned that they were encoded as arrays of numbers in upstream versions of Linux.
Since these blobs were present in previous versions of the kernel, it was decided to update the previous versions of Linux-libre 5.13, 5.10, 5.4, 4.19, 4.14, 4.9 and 4.4, labeling the new options with the tag "-gnu1".
Of course, the new GNU Linux-libre kernel is packed with the same new features and improvements that we can find in the Linux kernel, but it cleans up many of the newly added drivers to provide a 100% free kernel that does not include any proprietary code.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it About this new version of Linux-Libre 5.14, you can check the details In the following link.
How do I get and install Linux-Libre on my distribution?
For those who are interested in being able to try this Linux-Libre Kernel, the main recommendation for those who do not feel safe or do not have the necessary knowledge to carry out the compilation, the better choose to use any of the aforementioned distributions that make use of this kernel.
In case you want to obtain the packages to carry out the compilation, you can obtain them by going to the following link or you can also check the following information for distributions with support for APT.
Also for those who are interested in trying to clean the kernel of non-free parts, a universal shell script has been created within the Linux-libre project, containing thousands of templates to detect the presence of binary inserts and eliminate false positives. Ready-to-use patches created based on the use of the above script are also available for download.