No, AMD Will Not Be Opening Up Its Firmware/Microcode

This issue comes up every so often by people suggesting it or otherwise inquiring about it... No, AMD has no intentions of open-sourcing its low-level firmware / microcode for their Radeon GPUs.

It's been asked many times over the years, but there are no plans -- nor have there ever been as part of their open-source strategy -- for AMD to "free" their Radeon GPUs down to the firmware-level.

The matter of binary-only hardware microcode was once again brought up this week on the AMD graphics mailing list.

There also aren't any active efforts to reverse-engineer or provide a "free" firmware/BIOS for the Radeon graphics cards. Going back almost a decade was a plan to create a free software video BIOS by the late Oliver McFadden, but that project hadn't moved at all.

AMD's binary-only firmware for graphics hardware isn't unusual. Modern Intel graphics hardware makes use of binary-only firmware blobs too and since Maxwell the open-source Nouveau driver also depends upon binary-only firmware for hardware acceleration support where as previously they were able to provide reverse-engineered free software alternative with earlier generations of GeForce GPUs.