FSF To Look At RYF Certification For The POWER9 Talos II

[starshipeleven]

The AST2500 is built in, but isn't the only option.

Heh it has PCIe slots so you can plug in anything, really.

[starshipeleven]

There is so much IP in a modern GPU's firmware that I don't think we will ever see FSF-approved GPU (with competitive specifications). For the 2 UHD screens, the best we can do is a Matrox card, which has closed firmware, but at least its static, no blobs.

I thought Matrox had crap support in Linux (until their newer cards that are AMD-based), can you be more specific here?

[kobblestown]

On a related note, I've pre-ordered one. Not for use as a desktop though. I'm going to use mine as a server.

When it arrives, before you put it on duty, maybe you can grant Michael remote access to run his tests. Or do it yourself. It would be interesting to know how it performs.

Cheers, mate!

[ormaaj]

Nice. Actually a pretty competitive price compared to a comparable low-end dual-socket Xeon system.

[gnufreex]

you think germany can dictate Nacirema companies to opensource? Naciraema has occupation troops all over Germany, and Germany has no troops in Fashington.

[ormaaj]

FSF is gonna be like "Uh oh you don't use coreboot so you fail. Next time be more like the 2 old laptops that kind of support it.".

[madscientist159]

FSF is gonna be like "Uh oh you don't use coreboot so you fail. Next time be more like the 2 old laptops that kind of support it.".

Timothy Pearson here from Raptor Engineering. We've been in contact with the FSF and they are fully aware that coreboot is not used here. The IBM firmware stack is completely open, on GitHub right now [1] [2], and actually exceeds x86 in terms of the degree of freedom allowed to inspect, modify, and then run modified firmware components.

At this point the actual certification is likely a formality, once they receive production hardware to verify that our claims are in fact true. Until then they are officially supporting our hardware as a RYF candidate.

I hope this helps!

[1] https://github.com/open-power
[2] https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc

[diriel]

I really want one of these!

[hiryu]

When it arrives, before you put it on duty, maybe you can grant Michael remote access to run his tests. Or do it yourself. It would be interesting to know how it performs.

Cheers, mate!

In fact, I already made him the offer! Sounds like he may have something else worked out for this though.

[hiryu]

Heh it has PCIe slots so you can plug in anything, really.

Probably. Though I have to wonder if the firmware needs to be "aware". I remember back in the day it seemed like you needed certain GPU's to work on old PPC based Macs.