> There is no ROM programmer software. This was a misunderstanding on my part, when you wrote: > This can be done with a ROM programmer. Trust is now reduced

> There is no ROM programmer software. This was a misunderstanding on my part, when you wrote: > This can be done with a ROM programmer. Trust is now reduced to hardware and people who checked the software. I thought you were referring to software related to the ROM programmer (some ROM programmers do have software). I see now that you meant the software of the assembler, etc, and your scenario involves a pure-hardware ROM programmer. stage0 looks cool. I still maintain that it will need to be including OS-like functionality along the way, to have a way to invoke the desired programs with the desired inputs and outputs, allocate memory dynamically, etc. If you're dealing with the hardware directly, it just means you're implementing the OS functionality yourself. But stage0 is cool in the way that it bootstraps from such a small binary payload. > Trust is now reduced to hardware only. This is true, as long as you can get hardware that doesn't have any software underneath. That rules out any CPU with microcode, etc.