The POWER8 Libre System Looks Set To Fail, Now There's An AMD Libre System Effort

[torsionbar28]

Leah Rowe.. Ugh..
I'd never buy anything from her/him/it..

x2, I see that name and immediately recognize it as a toxic asset. Stay away, not worth it.

Too bad about that Talos workstation. I would have gladly purchased one if I could have bought the motherboard and CPU together for ~$2k, but at their asking price, I couldn't justify it.

[M@GOid]

It is not any easier for corporations. Nearly all tech companies have or currently are literally funding wars in Africa in order to buy elements like tantalum or gold for a lower price. They cut corners everywhere. So why would a corporation spend the amount of time and resources reverse-engineering another company's product, let alone a competitor? Don't forget the risks involved in the process where it could end up being a total waste of time, for example:
* If they find anything useful, it could be controlled via proprietary software (which they would also have to reverse engineer - very time consuming)
* If they find anything useful, it could be patented, in which case they can't do anything with it anyway.
* If they find anything useful that coincidentally has no restrictions, and, where they just happen to know how to utilize it, they still have to figure out how to implement the design into their own, which in itself is a very difficult and slow process that needs extensive testing.
* The average processor die has billions of transistors. It wouldn't surprise me if it was more difficult or time consuming to decipher a delidded processor than when archaeologists first deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics.
* They might not find anything useful at all. The competing product could end up having a worse design (in either hardware or software) where the complementing component happens to be really good. But that doesn't help because there's no access to that.

In other words, they'd be better off trying to speculate what the competition did and attempt to make it from scratch themselves than attempting to reverse-engineer it.

That may be true, but competitors get real suspicious very fast when stuff like that happens. Take Android's early days for example - Oracle wanted to sue Google for using their own code (which from what I recall, they didn't - it was just coincidentally very similar).

I'm not saying they do reverse-engineering every single bit of their competitors. But imagine that a team capable of building a complex chip with billions of transistors, will have no problem in looking at other designs and understand how they works and what advantages and disadvantages it has over their own design.

On the legal part, there is no problem. All kinds of industries, like the automotive, for example, do reverse-engineering for decades now. Heck, there is even companies specialized in doing it just to sell the information to anyone who show up with the money. Is not cheap though, but frees you of the trouble of doing it yourself. Here is a company that do it with cars:

http://jalopnik.com/the-fascinating-...d-o-1787205420

And I think it was the guys at Chipworks that delided a new Apple chip used in a iPhone and take photos of it with the chip working to see what light up in heat. They also provide similar services like the car company I linked above.

https://www.chipworks.com/competitive-technical-intelligence

[pal666]

this is 2017 and i am going to buy ryzen with 32 gb of memory, nvme ssd and vega. and it will cost few times less. i am willing to pay $100 more for board with preloaded coreboot, not few thousands more

Indeed, and here is the reason : https://libreboot.org/faq/#amdpsp

this faq entry lists no reasons for that

[pal666]

Can't an OEM use this to prevent installation of non-original-OS (likely Windows) altogether in a way that's impossible to fix without soldering iron?

it can do it even without this. and customer can choose another oem

[pal666]

So why would a corporation spend the amount of time and resources reverse-engineering another company's product, let alone a competitor?

there was a country which got all its cpus by reverse engineering products of potential adversary

* If they find anything useful, it could be patented, in which case they can't do anything with it anyway.

you don't need to reverse engineer what is patented, all patents are published

Take Android's early days for example - Oracle wanted to sue Google for using their own code (which from what I recall, they didn't - it was just coincidentally very similar).

it's a counter example really. google did not reverse engineer java(java is opensourced btw), but still got sued

[schmidtbag]

there was a country which got all its cpus by reverse engineering products of potential adversary

Country? Suppose you meant company, which one and when?

you don't need to reverse engineer what is patented, all patents are published

I'm aware - that doesn't change my point.

it's a counter example really. google did not reverse engineer java(java is opensourced btw), but still got sued

I'm aware Java is open-source. I'm aware Google didn't reverse engineer anything. I never implied otherwise about either. My point for bringing that up was companies don't like it when you use things that they deem their property and will do whatever it takes to either profit from it or shut you down, regardless of how justifiable it is. Oracle had no right to get money from Google but they sued anyway because they wanted a piece of the pie that Google has, because Oracle provided the recipe for just the crust.

[ssokolow]

Unfortunately there are a lot of things that need this *cough*Windows*cough*Secureboot*cough*, so removing the PSP isn't exactly something that can be done. There are also other reasons that I'm not at liberty to discuss, but it's mostly for "locked down" systems such as Windows and won't only affect the typical FOSS user.

Although with that said, the entry in the libreboot FAQ about the PSP is mostly FUD... but granted I see where the paranoia comes from. In a perfect world, none of this nonsense would be necessary.

The PSP serves the same DRM role that the Intel Management Engine was co-opted into.

Exploits have been demonstrated in previous versions of the Management Engine and, in order to provide the DRM capabilities, both of them run at a higher privilege level than your operating system. (In essence, they're hypervisors implemented in hardware)

You'll have to excuse me if I don't share your optimism.

[Mystro256]

The PSP serves the same DRM role that the Intel Management Engine was co-opted into.

Exploits have been demonstrated in previous versions of the Management Engine and, in order to provide the DRM capabilities, both of them run at a higher privilege level than your operating system. (In essence, they're hypervisors implemented in hardware)

You'll have to excuse me if I don't share your optimism.

Well to give some context, I was actually at Bridgman's desk the other day and I had a nice conversation with him about the state of FOSS at AMD. You could say the conversation gave me some optimism that some of the management have motivations to improve the state of things. I'm not a fan of the PSP myself, but with that said, there seems to be a decent amount of people at AMD who have genuine interest in providing quality free software. As well, I have my own motivations to work up to a position where I can make a bigger impact in that too.

[Luke]

Well to give some context, I was actually at Bridgman's desk the other day and I had a nice conversation with him about the state of FOSS at AMD. You could say the conversation gave me some optimism that some of the management have motivations to improve the state of things. I'm not a fan of the PSP myself, but with that said, there seems to be a decent amount of people at AMD who have genuine interest in providing quality free software. As well, I have my own motivations to work up to a position where I can make a bigger impact in that too.

This is good to see. I hear enough people complaining about the privacy implications of PSP that I am sure it is costing sales. I have been in plenty of places where all cellphones have to have their batteries taken out or be put into closed metal containers as a defense against surveillance and hacked devices, late model laptops with things like PSP probably are going to end up facing the same restrictions. People won't trust them to be truly off, much less running what they claim to be running.

[Luke]

http://hardenedlinux.org/firmware/20...ivybridge.html is an article about a script for crippling Intel's management engine enough to block the 30 minute shutdown Intel uses when it is not found. Fairly complex but it allows salvaging affected boards with the help of external flashing tools