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I thought that when the Intel Management Engine implementation details (hidden Minix!) were released that it would only be a matter of time for a "Full FOSS" mo

I thought that when the Intel Management Engine implementation details (hidden Minix!) were released that it would only be a matter of time for a "Full FOSS" movement within enthusiast communities. I was wrong, it seems. There hasn't even been a push for an affordable 802.3ab gigabit ethernet card with an FPGA.

mistrial9 3y ago
its not a democracy -- you discovered the implementation that is convenient to the towers of executive authority; there is no change just because it is more widely known, in fact, increased boldness in tracking activity in real-time and building dossiers on users for "ads" is growing, along with the stockpile of money available to implement that.
StillBored 3y ago
Ethernet card built from a FPGA or one with an FPGA on the side? Because in both questions your talking about the fact that there are basically three companies providing FPGAs and none of them seem particularly interested in killing their high margin markets. Worse the "DPU" crowd are largely selling about $100 worth of compute for $3k+ because it has an attached 100G port. OTOH I assume the next step for the icestorm/etc folks once they actually have a reasonable toolchain working on the lattice parts is to actually find a company willing to produce a low cost open FPGA and write the backend bits to work with the toolchain. Similarly there are various open ethernet mac projects floating around, although AFAIK none of them actually have been fabbed into something a random consumer can buy. So much of this is really just the broken VC model in the US, no one is interested in funding stable but low margin businesses when they can gamble on high risk/reward ones. And banks won't loan people money without some kind of collateral. I suspect you have to look to China/etc at this point for to fill in the "sell a crapload with little margin" business (ex: lenovo). Making it sorta inevitable that they steamroll everyone, because if there is one truth in the tech field, its the guy with the most volume tends to win long term. Along those lines, the Si consolation has really been a negative in may aspects of the market. If one could still buy current generation PCIe switches for less than the price of an entire computer it would still be possible to find motherboards that have shared device bandwidths (aka a half dozen x4 m.2 slots, or three x16 slots that aren't electrically just x4s) all hung off a x16 gen4/5 slot. Which is really the scam here, at least in my case I have a number of Gen3 parts which would all work great behind a single Gen4 x16 port with a switch port but instead I have to waste gen4 slots on gen3 devices.
- loup-vaillant 3y ago
  > I assume the next step for the icestorm/etc folks once they actually have a reasonable toolchain working on the lattice parts Wait, they don’t? What’s missing?

mistrial9 3y ago

its not a democracy -- you discovered the implementation that is convenient to the towers of executive authority; there is no change just because it is more widely known, in fact, increased boldness in tracking activity in real-time and building dossiers on users for "ads" is growing, along with the stockpile of money available to implement that.

StillBored 3y ago

Ethernet card built from a FPGA or one with an FPGA on the side? Because in both questions your talking about the fact that there are basically three companies providing FPGAs and none of them seem particularly interested in killing their high margin markets. Worse the "DPU" crowd are largely selling about $100 worth of compute for $3k+ because it has an attached 100G port. OTOH I assume the next step for the icestorm/etc folks once they actually have a reasonable toolchain working on the lattice parts is to actually find a company willing to produce a low cost open FPGA and write the backend bits to work with the toolchain. Similarly there are various open ethernet mac projects floating around, although AFAIK none of them actually have been fabbed into something a random consumer can buy. So much of this is really just the broken VC model in the US, no one is interested in funding stable but low margin businesses when they can gamble on high risk/reward ones. And banks won't loan people money without some kind of collateral. I suspect you have to look to China/etc at this point for to fill in the "sell a crapload with little margin" business (ex: lenovo). Making it sorta inevitable that they steamroll everyone, because if there is one truth in the tech field, its the guy with the most volume tends to win long term. Along those lines, the Si consolation has really been a negative in may aspects of the market. If one could still buy current generation PCIe switches for less than the price of an entire computer it would still be possible to find motherboards that have shared device bandwidths (aka a half dozen x4 m.2 slots, or three x16 slots that aren't electrically just x4s) all hung off a x16 gen4/5 slot. Which is really the scam here, at least in my case I have a number of Gen3 parts which would all work great behind a single Gen4 x16 port with a switch port but instead I have to waste gen4 slots on gen3 devices.

loup-vaillant 3y ago
> I assume the next step for the icestorm/etc folks once they actually have a reasonable toolchain working on the lattice parts Wait, they don’t? What’s missing?