a chunk of data held in machine-readable binary format, indecipherable by and unfriendly to humans.
"…usually refers to a device driver module loaded into the kernel of an open-source operating system… "
—wikipedia
In general terms a binary blob is something capable of being read and acted on by computer hardware, but a black box, genrally seen as hermetically, impenetrably formatted against human understanding. In the FOSS world, this is often Frowned Upon as it's unavailable with regard to the Four freedoms of software; unable to be studied, improved upon and shared. Hardware drivers and multimedia codecs often fall under this description, to the point where some idealist Linux distributions don't use them by default. As a result, sometimes one is obliged to track down alternative sources, as was the case when I first installed OpenSUSE Leap, but that nly required adding a seperate repo that contained the software.
Mostly, it has to be said, driver blobs do work fairly well, but there are issues:
Open-source communities value being able to audit and modify code. Binary blobs work against that kind of transparency. Since one can’t review what a blob is doing, it could contain bugs or even malicious code, and furthermore, blobs can break when the kernel updates, since they may not be maintained in sync. The latter is a big issue for NVidia owners when updating their kernel.This especially the case for anyone using a rolling release distro.
If ever you stumble upon this issue, approaching those who support your software is often necessary and useful; most distributions have web forums dedicated to community support and often the solution will have been posted.
o understand what a 64kb blob is, it just needs to store and retrieve it.
(r) 2025-04-24@13:20 (43.9 min) C-Dawg says re binary blob: I guess I don't understand why a software module is being regarded as a problem, or has anything to do with open source. The source code is not a binary blob (unless it's especially distributed that way). But the only way I've ever heard of blob being described is simply a string of bits that is meaningful to someone but needn't be to everyone. For example, storing an image/sound/video in a database would generally be done as a blob. The db doesn't need to know what it is.
wertperch replies: "It's a philosphical argument, a 'blob' is something designed to be dropped into e.g. the Linux kernel without exposing its inner workings. It's inherently anti-FOSS…Describing a piece of video as a blob is fine, but the codec shouldn't be."
$ xclip -o | wc -w
257