Absolutely - nobody should accept anything less than a fully owner controlled and fully auditable system - especially when you're providing secure networking se

Absolutely - nobody should accept anything less than a fully owner controlled and fully auditable system - especially when you're providing secure networking services to customers. Good on them for porting coreboot to this new, modern supermicro platform - it's a gargantuan amount of hard work and I'm glad they did it and published it. However, I have to take issue with this statement: > This is the first time a modern off-the-shelf server platform gains coreboot support, and it is an integral part of realizing our vision of transparent and independently auditable VPN servers. While this is the first modern coreboot system - it is not, by the implication, the first modern server system with fully open source firmware. In fact, I contend that the firmware isn't even fully open source, nor is it fully auditable - the ME taint is still present, as the article clearly states. (EDIT: I did not read the original article terribly clearly - it is extremely clear in this regard - and it doesn't position the system as being "fully" open source. My mistake and I'm sorry. See comments below for response/apology in response to author's correction.) In contrast, the Talos II server system, a POWER9 (powerpc64/LE) system, by Raptor Computing Systems has been shipping for well over a year now - and it has fully open source firmware - and by that I mean everything, supported and developed by both the community, Raptor Computing, other OpenPOWER Foundation members and IBM. The only remaining blob on the base Talos II system is the blob firmware for the onboard NICs - and that's been fully documented and clean-room reverse engineered and the replacement open source project is just about completed (project ortega). It's already usable in beta form, but if it's an issue for you until them - disable them and use an add-in card. However, unlike the Xeon platform referenced as being the first modern coreboot server platform, the Talos II, or any other OpenPOWER system, does not have an invasive management engine in every CPU you have zero access to with zero auditability. It's not enough for the firmware to be open source, I want my systems documentation to look like this: https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Category:Documentation https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Category:Documentation - so that I can write that firmware if I have to. I seriously doubt the supermicro board would include schematics, like the Talos II or Blackbird does, either. That said, if instead the existing open source firmware, you really want coreboot - which the Talos II does not yet support - for a specific reason - it's being actively ported to the platform, but not out of necessity, instead it's an exercise in open source firmware diversity - as it should be. If you want a fully auditable, owner controlled, open source platform for your VPNs, or for any other application, x86 based systems aren't it - because, by Intel's ME and AMD's PSP designs, they can't be.