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What could be arguments for not doing so? Not a rhetorical question - I'm genuinely curious. What's the point of keeping BIOS blobs in secrecy? If it's some se
by drdaeman 10y ago
What could be arguments for not doing so?
Not a rhetorical question - I'm genuinely curious. What's the point of keeping BIOS blobs in secrecy? If it's some secret sauce know-hows - what sort of information could be possibly revealed, that a skilled competitor-hired reverse engineer can't obtain? I understand that it's hard to talk about actual secrets, but are there any similar-enough examples from the past?
I know many hardware companies are highly secretive-by-default, but is that a real thing, this secrecy protects, or just some business superstitions?
- floatboth 10y agoBIOS blobs aren't the problem, coreboot actually replaces them. The problem is early initialization firmware on the CPU/chipset/etc. And the fact that parts of initialization are moved into Management Engine / Platform Security Processor which are tiny processors running a third party proprietary OS (Trustonic TEE OS in the case of AMD). Of course there's no real thing to protect, these companies just don't give a fuck.
- i336_ 10y ago> Trustonic TEE OS I have visions of the Windows 95 3D screensaver, with the walls, floor and ceiling displaying the many, many NDAs you need to sign to get access to this. (I must admit that what initially came to mind was ~2:25 in http://youtu.be/EUXnJraKM3k http://youtu.be/EUXnJraKM3k (2:55).) In all seriousness, this may be the tricky bit. AMD may need to release the PSP spec and get Libreboot to take it from there. Considering the huge amount of support for this though, I can totally see a crowdfunded firmware implementation for the PSP working out.