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Purism claims to have gotten access to intel CPUs specially fused to run unsigned Management Engine firmware, and it claims to have made progress on a minimal r

by ploxiln 11y ago

Purism claims to have gotten access to intel CPUs specially fused to run unsigned Management Engine firmware, and it claims to have made progress on a minimal replacement for the ME firmware. The plan for the microcode is to just not ship any updates, either in the bios or the default distro. The other parts will indeed take a lot more time, but it isn't hopeless. https://puri.sm/posts/pioneering-cpu-efforts-to-liberate-laptop-hardware/ https://puri.sm/posts/pioneering-cpu-efforts-to-liberate-lap... https://puri.sm/posts/weekly-update-on-librem-production-2015-10-02/ https://puri.sm/posts/weekly-update-on-librem-production-201...

garrettgrimsley 11y ago
Wow, I wonder how they pulled that off. It's certainly a good start, but since it will be shipping with non-Free (though replaceable) BIOS binaries it would still fall short of the Respects Your Freedom hardware certification requirements. I did some digging since I have little knowledge of the Purism project. The Purism project offers an estimate of one year for replacing the non-Free blobs in the firmware. The Libreboot FAQ says that it could take years to replace the Intel FSP or Video BIOS, much less both. Given that a Coreboot developer has expressed doubts [0, 1] about the bold claims the Purism project has made in the past I'm inclined to take the word of the folks working on Libreboot. If by the time, if ever, a truly Libre product ships from Purism will it be any less dated than the X200 we have now? [0] http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/08/09/the-truth-about-purism-behind-the-coreboot-scenes/ http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/08/09/the-truth-about-pu... [1] http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/02/23/the-truth-about-purism-why-librem-is-not-the-same-as-libre/ http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/02/23/the-truth-about-pu...

by ploxiln 11y ago

garrettgrimsley 11y ago

Wow, I wonder how they pulled that off. It's certainly a good start, but since it will be shipping with non-Free (though replaceable) BIOS binaries it would still fall short of the Respects Your Freedom hardware certification requirements. I did some digging since I have little knowledge of the Purism project. The Purism project offers an estimate of one year for replacing the non-Free blobs in the firmware. The Libreboot FAQ says that it could take years to replace the Intel FSP or Video BIOS, much less both. Given that a Coreboot developer has expressed doubts [0, 1] about the bold claims the Purism project has made in the past I'm inclined to take the word of the folks working on Libreboot. If by the time, if ever, a truly Libre product ships from Purism will it be any less dated than the X200 we have now? [0] http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/08/09/the-truth-about-purism-behind-the-coreboot-scenes/ http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/08/09/the-truth-about-pu... [1] http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/02/23/the-truth-about-purism-why-librem-is-not-the-same-as-libre/ http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/02/23/the-truth-about-pu...