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

[Mario Junior]

*$3,700 for just the motherboard
*$7,100 if you want CPU too

I think I know why it failed.

[Davidovitch]

I think Talos wrote a pretty clear but also dark final update on the state of open hardware on their crowd funding page:
https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-c...los-winds-down

That being said, we should not give up! The fact that a company like Talos and others are out there trying raise these issues is hugely important. It makes me hopeful that one day there will be better times (I chose to be an optimist out of a self conservation principle). But it should also be clear that we can not expect this journey to be free of any costs, and I think as a community we might need to wake up and put our money where are mouths are. I am sorry I wasn't able to push myself to put forward $7000 to support this hugely important task.

[Iffith]

I was ready to buy one of these until I heard Leah Rowe was associated with it.

[madscientist159]

I was ready to buy one of these until I heard Leah Rowe was associated with it.

Just for the record, Leah Rowe was not associated with Talos beyond being a public advocate of libre systems, of which Talos was basically the only performant machine that would have shipped from the OEM with fully libre firmware. Minifree also happens to be the only supplier of relatively inexpensive / low powered libre machines on the market at this time, which is why they were linked in the final Talos update under the "For Individuals" section; if you or your organization can afford POWER servers IBM is the preferred supplier of libre systems at this time.

[pal666]

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

country. ussr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...icroprocessors

[pal666]

I am sorry I wasn't able to push myself to put forward $7000 to support this hugely important task.

what is so important about paying $7k for cpu+motherboard?

[Luke]

That Talos story about vendor-controlled systems and the intentional bricking of the Nest devices and flaming Samsung phones in interesting. This is going to cause people to keep buying known good older hardware at computer shows and over Ebay et all, possibly all the way back to the Pentium 4 and Athlon 64. I do not throw those systems away and this is one of the reasons. In the future they will be considered valuble however slow as systems on which the user has root and can deny corporate and governmental access. They will be used in darknets, in encrypted communications, and yes, for porn and filesharing.

With Trump taking power, the value of these systems will rise. They are a lot like guns with serial numbers drilled out except for being totally legal to own. They will not go away until electromigration kills them all, and by then we will be able to make laptops by replacing the entire motherboard with bottom-barrel ARM stuff, often retasked from another purpose. Here's an example: someone has hacked HDD controllers to run arbitrary code, and the proc on it is powerful enough to run a slow, simple laptop or will be on future drives. The firmware may have back doors, but the authors of those back doors did not anticipate the controller core ever being used to do anything other than run a hard drive. Thus the backdoors bypass the ATA security set with a master password, but probably do not include running a keylogger when the chip is running a laptop screen and network card instead of an HDD. The firmware is simple enough for direct decompilation and analysis.

[Davidovitch]

what is so important about paying $7k for cpu+motherboard?

This is just an opinion obviously, but I don't thrust propriety systems. Full stop. All kind of nasty things can and will happen after a while. This is what the Talos devs write about it in the final update I referred to earlier (but here it is again):

the current trend in computing is to effectively move the hypervisor and/or kernel into the main platform firmware. If this is done with vendor-controlled systems, libre software will be reduced to a set of userspace tools, similar to what has happened on jailbroken iPhones or Android devices. Over time, licenses may even be required to run specific userspace tools where the libre offerings compete with commercial offerings on the same platform. The only way to stop this future is to financially support owner-controlled hardware development, regardless of which company is offering owner-controlled hardware at any given time.

If I would have bought a Talos system, I would have supported owner controlled hardware development. You could argue that such a purchase in my specific use case is based on political grounds, not necessarily on a technical need. Although you could argue that truly owning your own hardware might become a non-trivial need in the future.

[pal666]

This is just an opinion obviously, but I don't thrust propriety systems. Full stop.

why then pay $7k for proprietary hardware?

[Davidovitch]

why then pay $7k for proprietary hardware?

Don't you agree that the Talos system would be as open as it could be? Especially considering current Intel/AMD/etc stuff and their microcode blobs? I guess Talos isn't a truly open hardware platform in the sense that maybe a hypothetical RISC-V system could be. What I mend with not trusting propriety systems should be seen in the context of all the software layers that run on your hardware, and how a vendor might be able to run and execute whatever it wants on your hardware.