Not All Of The IBM POWER10 Firmware Is Currently Open-Source

[hamishmb]

A good 90% or more of amd64 linux software should compile just fine on ppc64/64le. Void Linux PPC's website suggests a number of at least 97%. Besides that, yes, it's being written for, if not as often as for amd64. In the before-times, you could build a decent Blackbird computer for $2100 or less, and nowadays that number is around $2600 - I've seen people happily drop over $3000 for a not all that much more powerful computer, with more unpatchable vulnerabilities due to the complacency Intel has as the CPU company, begrudgingly alongside AMD.
Really, right now is a hot period of activity for consumer POWER devices; besides the Raptor CS computers, there's the PowerPC notebook on an e6500 and the Libre-SOC project implementing OpenPOWER v3.0 in a non-IBM package.

VOID PPC is pretty good, but there are quite a lot of omissions in the repos I find. Of course, that doesn't mean they can't be built, but that VOID PPC isn't building them.

[mulenmar]

There are huge number of free software people not installing microcode patches for Spectre because they thing that will somehow make them more free. This is stupid. There is several hundred times more microcode built into the CPU than is in the patch and nobody really has any choice whether there is a backdoor either way. The only thing they can do about it is install the patch and eliminate the one security flaw we actually know about, and can demonstrate exists with proof-of-concept code.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the position.

I don't have a problem with the microcode patch installation BS because I "thing [sic] that will somehow make [me] more free". I have a problem with it because there is no way to vet it, and I don't want to put *more* untrustworthy code into an already untrustworthy device. I have a problem with it because it's a technology designed to prevent the manufacturer from doing its job correctly in the first place, rather than chase after profits over razor-thin performance increases that drive FURTHER conflict mineral mining, electricity-guzzling, and global climate disruption.

That's the decision they made when they bought an intel chip. And every time they continue to use it.

Not merely misunderstanding, but active misrepresentation.

AMD does the same thing, merely with fewer found glitches.

My options were:

- Go Intel, and get much better performance at the time (Haswell) for what was represented as a correctly-functional chip at the time, and hope someone figures out how to fully-disable the Management Engine.

Wow, THAT worked out well! TSX buggy, ME only able to be disabled to an extent apparently, and ALL THE SPECULATIVE EXECUTION BUGS.

- Go AMD, and have much worse performance-per-watt, and STILL have an equivalent to the Management Engine via their Platform Security Processor.
- Go ARM, and have worse performance with no way to upgrade anything, plus less reliable software and almost no games outside emulation. Oh, and modern ARM uses speculative execution, too. To say nothing of even more blobs everywhere.
- Go bankrupt trying to pay off a loan to buy a Talos II system.

The situation has not improved much since, aside from better ARM support. It's gotten worse in some respects, given how power-hungry everything in x86_64 land is getting now (assuming you want to be able to significantly upgrade it -- no, laptop CPUs on a microATX board in a shitty prebuilt do not help) and how expensive even a Blackbird machine is.

Layered on top of this, the RYF rules (from the FSF) are stupid. Purism has the same blob as the POWER10 RAM in their Librem phones, for the same reason. Their SoC uses the same Synopsys DDR4 phy IP and thus the same blob. As far as RYF/FSF are concerned, this is 100% ok. Why? because purism sealed the blob away so that the user can't touch it. Not only are purism themselves the manufacturer (here the manufacturer isn't evil) but this actively hurts user freedom.

Nobody can inspect the blob to see if there really is a backdoor. Nobody can document what it does. Nobody can ever develop an open-source replacement because Purism physically made it irreplaceable.

We agree here, the RYF rules are clearly designed to make Richard Stallman happy, and he's too old and set in an obsolete worldview to get through his head that the tech industry has specifically adapted to work around software freedom attempts. Manufacturers have designed -- likely with no small amount of nudging from US et al intelligence agencies -- critical parts of all commodity hardware, and nearly all high-performance hardware, to be impossible to both guarantee a lack of undesirable operations AND be usable. Or even bootable, assuming your CPU requires working RAM...