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Right, who wants or benefits from open source firmware anyway. Also there are many situations where renting, for example a flat makes a lot of sense. And there

Right, who wants or benefits from open source firmware anyway. Also there are many situations where renting, for example a flat makes a lot of sense. And there are many situations where the financials and or enabled options of owning something make a lot of sense. Right now, the kind of experience you get with AWS and co. can only be rented, not bought. Some people want to buy houses instead of renting them.

Always_Anon 3y ago
>Right, who wants or benefits from open source firmware anyway. Their competition has open source firmware as well: https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/enabling-open-embedded-systems-management-on-poweredge-servers/ https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/enabling-open-embedded-syste...
- bcantrill 3y ago
  So OpenBMC is fine (happy for them!), but having open firmware is much deeper and broader than that: yes, it's the service processor (in contrast to the BMC which is a closed part on Dell machines) -- but it's also the root-of-trust and (especially) the host CPU itself. We at Oxide have open source software from first instruction out of the AMD PSP; I elaborated more on our approach in my OSFC 2022 talk.[0] [0] https://www.osfc.io/2022/talks/i-have-come-to-bury-the-bios-not-to-open-it-the-need-for-holistic-systems/ https://www.osfc.io/2022/talks/i-have-come-to-bury-the-bios-...
  - Always_Anon 3y ago
    Dell now ships with OpenBMC iDRACs and such. How does what you mention differ from the RoT in Dells? https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/hardware-root-trust/ https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/hardware-root-trust/
    - c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
      Dell uses trusted platform modules (TPM). It's a separate chipset than the BMC chipset. For a mostly open source solution, not only would you need open source BMC firmware, you must have an open source UEFI/BIOS/boot firmware like CoreBoot, LinuxBoot, Oreboot, Uboot, etc.
necovek 3y ago
Well, you can buy your own hardware and set it up with OpenStack and use it as a private cloud. Companies like Canonical or Redhat make a lot of money by providing software (mostly open source) to support exactly that use case. And Canonical played with a cluster-in-a-box all the way back in 2013-2014: https://www.zdnet.com/article/canonicals-cloud-in-a-box-under-the-hood/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/canonicals-cloud-in-a-box-unde... You could turn it into an OpenStack cloud in ~20 mins with an automated Juju OpenStack install.
- jjav 3y ago
  > Well, you can buy your own hardware and set it up with OpenStack and use it as a private cloud. Companies like Canonical or Redhat make a lot of money by providing software (mostly open source) to support exactly that use case. Sure you can, but then who will diagnose and fix your hardware/OS interaction problems when you have parts from five vendors in the mix? If you haven't lived through this, the answer is: nobody. Everyone points fingers at the other 4 and ignore your calls. Back in the day you could buy a fully integrated system (from CPU to hardware to OS) from Sun or SGI or HP and you had a single company to answer all the calls, so it was much better. Today you can't really get this level of integration and support anymore. (Actually, you probably can from IBM, which is why they're still around. But I have no experience in the IBM universe.) This is why Oxide is so exciting to me. I hope I can be in a company that becomes a customer at some point.
  - Always_Anon 3y ago
    >Sure you can, but then who will diagnose and fix your hardware/OS interaction problems when you have parts from five vendors in the mix? Dell is a single vendor that will diagnose and fix all of your hardware issues. With Oxide you're locked into what looks like a Solaris derivative OS running on the metal and you're only allowed to provision VMs which is a huge disadvantage. I run a fleet of over 30,000 nodes in three continents and the majority is Flatcar Linux running on bare metal. Also have a decent amount of RHEL running for specific apps. We can pick and choose our bare metal OS which is something you cannot do with Oxide. That's a tough pill to swallow.

Always_Anon 3y ago

>Right, who wants or benefits from open source firmware anyway. Their competition has open source firmware as well: https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/enabling-open-embedded-systems-management-on-poweredge-servers/ https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/enabling-open-embedded-syste...

bcantrill 3y ago
So OpenBMC is fine (happy for them!), but having open firmware is much deeper and broader than that: yes, it's the service processor (in contrast to the BMC which is a closed part on Dell machines) -- but it's also the root-of-trust and (especially) the host CPU itself. We at Oxide have open source software from first instruction out of the AMD PSP; I elaborated more on our approach in my OSFC 2022 talk.[0] [0] https://www.osfc.io/2022/talks/i-have-come-to-bury-the-bios-not-to-open-it-the-need-for-holistic-systems/ https://www.osfc.io/2022/talks/i-have-come-to-bury-the-bios-...
- Always_Anon 3y ago
  Dell now ships with OpenBMC iDRACs and such. How does what you mention differ from the RoT in Dells? https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/hardware-root-trust/ https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/hardware-root-trust/
  - c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
    Dell uses trusted platform modules (TPM). It's a separate chipset than the BMC chipset. For a mostly open source solution, not only would you need open source BMC firmware, you must have an open source UEFI/BIOS/boot firmware like CoreBoot, LinuxBoot, Oreboot, Uboot, etc.

necovek 3y ago

Well, you can buy your own hardware and set it up with OpenStack and use it as a private cloud. Companies like Canonical or Redhat make a lot of money by providing software (mostly open source) to support exactly that use case. And Canonical played with a cluster-in-a-box all the way back in 2013-2014: https://www.zdnet.com/article/canonicals-cloud-in-a-box-under-the-hood/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/canonicals-cloud-in-a-box-unde... You could turn it into an OpenStack cloud in ~20 mins with an automated Juju OpenStack install.

jjav 3y ago
> Well, you can buy your own hardware and set it up with OpenStack and use it as a private cloud. Companies like Canonical or Redhat make a lot of money by providing software (mostly open source) to support exactly that use case. Sure you can, but then who will diagnose and fix your hardware/OS interaction problems when you have parts from five vendors in the mix? If you haven't lived through this, the answer is: nobody. Everyone points fingers at the other 4 and ignore your calls. Back in the day you could buy a fully integrated system (from CPU to hardware to OS) from Sun or SGI or HP and you had a single company to answer all the calls, so it was much better. Today you can't really get this level of integration and support anymore. (Actually, you probably can from IBM, which is why they're still around. But I have no experience in the IBM universe.) This is why Oxide is so exciting to me. I hope I can be in a company that becomes a customer at some point.
- Always_Anon 3y ago
  >Sure you can, but then who will diagnose and fix your hardware/OS interaction problems when you have parts from five vendors in the mix? Dell is a single vendor that will diagnose and fix all of your hardware issues. With Oxide you're locked into what looks like a Solaris derivative OS running on the metal and you're only allowed to provision VMs which is a huge disadvantage. I run a fleet of over 30,000 nodes in three continents and the majority is Flatcar Linux running on bare metal. Also have a decent amount of RHEL running for specific apps. We can pick and choose our bare metal OS which is something you cannot do with Oxide. That's a tough pill to swallow.