5 ms·

> In practice every single modern system is running tons of binary firmware blobs This is a problem we should be loud critics of. Proprietary firmware hurts us

> In practice every single modern system is running tons of binary firmware blobs This is a problem we should be loud critics of. Proprietary firmware hurts us all, and practically benefits no one.

fsflover 3y ago
It's a bit better in Pinephone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36659544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36659544
matheusmoreira 3y ago
Yeah. These days our operating systems don't actually operate the system anymore. Hardware manufacturers usurped our control of the machine. They think of Linux as the "user OS", to be virtualized and sandboxed away from the real computer. https://youtu.be/36myc8wQhLo https://youtu.be/36myc8wQhLo
- gary_0 3y ago
  Only a secret and privileged few actually get to boot and talk to a modern physical CPU. The rest of us only get to run on top of an abstraction. Wake up, Neo. The Matrix has you...
- StillBored 3y ago
  And frankly that is as it should be. The OS has enough responsibility trying to arbitrate the collection of hardware resources while providing its own set of abstractions (filesystems, processes, etc) to the application layers. These computers are no longer simple cores with simple devices. If you want that go buy a DOS machine from the 1980's, or a arm7TDMI. The problem though is that companies invest in all this firmware, and become convinced that DIMM training, signal integrity/phy training, and algorithms which estimate the cooling capacity and thermal mass of the attached heatsink, or any of a hundred other things are somehow competitive advantages and deserve to be locked up behind closed doors rather than opensource. In some cases they are right, but that shouldn't keep them from publishing reference firmware sources and register documentation. So, really people complaining about proprietary firmware are sorta missing the point. Complain about the lack of documentation to create your own firmware, not that the company thinks they have a competitive advantage in that firmware. And also admit that what one needs is hardware/firmware abstractions that allow big kernels like linux to communicate with all the little cores in the machine working on specific tasks, be that NVMe for disks, AT command sets for modems, or ACPI for power management.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    What good is open source firmware when the hardware only accepts cryptographically signed proprietary blobs?
    - sliken 3y ago
      Assuming you can verify the signed blob identical to the one you can build yourself, you can verify there's no intentional back doors or unintentional security issues. Not as good as being able to sign it yourself, but way better than not having the source. It also prevents an attacker from hacking the hardware in a way that would persist after a full reinstall of the OS.
      - matheusmoreira 3y ago
        Yes, I agree. Source code and reproducible builds which can be cryptographically verified to be equivalent to the signed blob would go a long way towards making them trustworthy. Still denies us the freedom to modify them but at least trust could be assured.
  - 127361 3y ago
    Not on Rockchip platforms as far as I am aware. The RK3588 is one of their highest performing SoCs, it has 4 Cortex-A76 cores running 2.4GHz thus making it somewhat close to desktop performance, without any of these blobs or locked down bootloaders. And mostly complete documentation[1] is available. 1. https://github.com/FanX-Tek/rk3588-TRM-and-Datasheet/tree/master https://github.com/FanX-Tek/rk3588-TRM-and-Datasheet/tree/ma...
    - sliken 3y ago
      I believe DDR training and USB have blobs: https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588/rkbin/-/tree/master/bin/rk35?ref_type=heads https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35... I wish the rk3588 was blobless, sadly not. Nice little widgets, crazy faster than a pi4.

> In practice every single modern system is running tons of binary firmware blobs This is a problem we should be loud critics of. Proprietary firmware hurts us all, and practically benefits no one.

fsflover 3y ago

It's a bit better in Pinephone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36659544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36659544

matheusmoreira 3y ago

Yeah. These days our operating systems don't actually operate the system anymore. Hardware manufacturers usurped our control of the machine. They think of Linux as the "user OS", to be virtualized and sandboxed away from the real computer. https://youtu.be/36myc8wQhLo https://youtu.be/36myc8wQhLo

gary_0 3y ago
Only a secret and privileged few actually get to boot and talk to a modern physical CPU. The rest of us only get to run on top of an abstraction. Wake up, Neo. The Matrix has you...
StillBored 3y ago
And frankly that is as it should be. The OS has enough responsibility trying to arbitrate the collection of hardware resources while providing its own set of abstractions (filesystems, processes, etc) to the application layers. These computers are no longer simple cores with simple devices. If you want that go buy a DOS machine from the 1980's, or a arm7TDMI. The problem though is that companies invest in all this firmware, and become convinced that DIMM training, signal integrity/phy training, and algorithms which estimate the cooling capacity and thermal mass of the attached heatsink, or any of a hundred other things are somehow competitive advantages and deserve to be locked up behind closed doors rather than opensource. In some cases they are right, but that shouldn't keep them from publishing reference firmware sources and register documentation. So, really people complaining about proprietary firmware are sorta missing the point. Complain about the lack of documentation to create your own firmware, not that the company thinks they have a competitive advantage in that firmware. And also admit that what one needs is hardware/firmware abstractions that allow big kernels like linux to communicate with all the little cores in the machine working on specific tasks, be that NVMe for disks, AT command sets for modems, or ACPI for power management.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  What good is open source firmware when the hardware only accepts cryptographically signed proprietary blobs?
  - sliken 3y ago
    Assuming you can verify the signed blob identical to the one you can build yourself, you can verify there's no intentional back doors or unintentional security issues. Not as good as being able to sign it yourself, but way better than not having the source. It also prevents an attacker from hacking the hardware in a way that would persist after a full reinstall of the OS.
    - matheusmoreira 3y ago
      Yes, I agree. Source code and reproducible builds which can be cryptographically verified to be equivalent to the signed blob would go a long way towards making them trustworthy. Still denies us the freedom to modify them but at least trust could be assured.
- 127361 3y ago
  Not on Rockchip platforms as far as I am aware. The RK3588 is one of their highest performing SoCs, it has 4 Cortex-A76 cores running 2.4GHz thus making it somewhat close to desktop performance, without any of these blobs or locked down bootloaders. And mostly complete documentation[1] is available. 1. https://github.com/FanX-Tek/rk3588-TRM-and-Datasheet/tree/master https://github.com/FanX-Tek/rk3588-TRM-and-Datasheet/tree/ma...
  - sliken 3y ago
    I believe DDR training and USB have blobs: https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588/rkbin/-/tree/master/bin/rk35?ref_type=heads https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35... I wish the rk3588 was blobless, sadly not. Nice little widgets, crazy faster than a pi4.