5 ms·
Where can people go if they want a fully-libre machine and are willing to sacrifice x86?
by endgame 10y ago
Where can people go if they want a fully-libre machine and are willing to sacrifice x86?
- mappu 10y agohttps://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/ https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/ If you want to avoid the ME specifically, some other not-100%-libre options you might consider are the TALOS (high performance) or the ODROID C2 (low cost)
- b34r 10y agoArduino
- badsock 10y agohttps://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php It's quite expensive, and prerelease, but from what I heard it fits the bill.
- endgame 10y agoOutside of my price range but worth keeping an eye on. Thanks.
- kriro 10y agoPi-top like laptop with your choice of pi3 or BeagleBone running Linux. The performance of a pi3 is actually decent. It's not perfect as there's a GPU BLOB in the pi3 and the BB also has some issue. It's my compromise for now, hoping the blob will be reversed/replaced eventually. Or anything that runs libreboot: https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/ https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/ If OpenBSD runs on it that's also a good sign usually as they won't touch anything with BLOBs.
- endgame 10y agoI do actually on a Pi3, so that's an encouraging piece of info. A GPU blob is at least a step up from the ring-negative-3 management engine.
- dividuum 10y agoI don't think it's a big difference to be honest: The GPU firmware (start.elf) is required to boot the Pi. There is no source code available at the moment. The GPU firmware runs in parallel to the CPU and has access to the complete memory. Video decoding is done by the GPU and happens while the CPU is completely idle. And it can (of course) crash. If you've done anything related to OMX programming on the Pi, you might have experienced that. In theory there is nothing that would prevent the a rogue firmware from hooking into kernel structures to interface with the outside world.
- throwaway2048 10y agorpis have even more blobs to initalize the hardware than x86/intel
- floatboth 10y agoWell, the Pi blob can be replaced… almost… soon… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11703842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11703842 / https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware Not a ready drop-in replacement yet, but running ARM code with access to the SD card and the UART console is possible! edit: By the way! The Pi loads all the firmware from the SD card — no reflashable memory on the board AFAIK – which would make it excellent from the "State considered harmful" perspective http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/12/23/state_harmful.html http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/12/23/state_harmful.htm...
- ashitlerferad 10y agoWait for RISC-V/lowRISC or j-core/J4: http://riscv.org/ http://riscv.org/ http://www.lowrisc.org/ http://www.lowrisc.org/ http://0pf.org/ http://0pf.org/ http://j-core.org/ http://j-core.org/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]