[GTALUG] You may already have a Windows licence and not know it …

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: mwilson--- via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| Sorry for the misinformation: the non-free firmware was needed to get Wifi
| to work.  (It was a Debian netinstall, so I guess my mind conflated that
| with booting.)

There is firmware for UEFI and ACPI and SMM and all those things.  This is 
almost always in "ROM".  (It isn't strictly ROM since it can by updated by 
flashing new firmware.)  (I suspect it is in a serial-access eePROM (SPI) 
and gets loaded into RAM as part of power-on reset.)

Firmware blobs for device drivers are typically loaded by the OS from disk 
files.

Those two kinds of firmware a logistically quite different.

Essentially no firmware for booting comes from a disk.  UEFI booting can 
run UEFI binaries (.efi) from /boot.  That may include diagnostic programs 
or a UEFI shell.

| > Znoteer wrote:
| >> On Tue, Apr 13, 2021 at 07:42:47PM -0400, Stewart Russell via talk
| >> wrote:
| >>> If the file /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM exists (it's read-only to
| >>> root),
| >>> there's probably a key embedded in there you can pull out with strings
| >>>
| >>
| >> I don't seem to have that file, and I'm not surprised.  Under what
| >> circumstances might one have that file on a linux system?

Here's my current understanding:

If you bought hardware with bundled Windows, from a major manufacturer, in 
the last few years, it should be there.

If you bought a system, with OEM Windows, assembled from bits by a smaller 
vendor, the a Windows product key should not be there.  You should have 
been given a product key on a "certificate" printed on cardstock.

If you bought a system (or motherboard) with no bundled Windows, I would 
expect the product key would be missing.

| > Is it perhaps a license for installed firmware?  I have that file on an
| > HP/Compaq laptop, in a fresh Debian install to a brand-new SSD.  We had to
| > install some non-free firmware to get the laptop to boot.  It was all done
| > in a spirit of hasty improvisation, so I don't remember which firmware it
| > was.
| > Way back when, the laptop was delivered with Windows 10, which I blew away
| > on the original HD.  The license number for that is on a sticker on the
| > bottom, and it's a different license number from the one in the MSDM file.

How "wayback"?  My HP desktop from 2013 has the "file".  
/sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM is in the /sys filesystem which has all 
sorts of things made to act like files, but they are not on a disk.