5 ms·
I like they use main processing unit from a Dutch company; is its ROM open source or/and can be accessed? All ARM-based Sytem-on-Chips do have a proprietary RO
by novaRom 7y ago
I like they use main processing unit from a Dutch company; is its ROM open source or/and can be accessed?
All ARM-based Sytem-on-Chips do have a proprietary ROM, which is used mainly for boot-up and multicore management. But there's no access to check if it may do something else.
>> The mobile baseband will most likely use ROM loaded firmware
this is another vulnerability
- floatboth 7y agoThe immutable ROM that finds firmware and jumps to it is indeed usually proprietary, but since it's tiny and immutable, it's considered "part of hardware" and is okay even for the FSF "Respects your Freedom" certification. The one mutable/loadable blob the i.MX8 requires is firmware for the DDR4 PHY (not training code you run on the CPU, but something that runs on the PHY apparently??) and they're using an embedded tiny cortex-M4 core to just load it: https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-solving-the-first-fsf-ryf-hurdle/ https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-solving-the-first-fsf-ryf-hurd... (IMO, that's a silly requirement from the FSF, I think keeping the main CPU free of blobs that it doesn't run i.e. blobs for other things does not have any meaningful benefits)
- als0 7y ago> (IMO, that's a silly requirement from the FSF, I think keeping the main CPU free of blobs that it doesn't run i.e. blobs for other things does not have any meaningful benefits) Depends on how privileged the peripheral or subsystem is. And what data it is trusted with. If it can't harm the main CPU and is properly confined then it's fine in my book.
- mkesper 7y ago>> The mobile baseband will most likely use ROM loaded firmware > this is another vulnerability That's why there's a hardware kill switch on it.