Developer Warns Of "Uncorrectable Freedom & Security Issues" For x86

[drSeehas]

...

So you don't really have an alternative to a Kabini based laptop. Q.E.D.

[SystemCrasher]

I am talking/writing about today, you are talking/writing about the future 5 years later.
Which laptop with at least 4 core Kabini performance do you recommend today?

Speaking for myself, I do not care much about laptop "performance", since laptops are inherently constrained by battery life, size and weight considerations and so on, so either they are going to be weak compared to desktop of equal price, or it going to be heavy, hot monster with noisy cooler and 2h of battery life. Which makes it mediocre computer and unusable laptop (aka computer I can use in-field), etc. For me laptop isn't a primary workstaton, it is a secondary computer to use in field, when size, weight and battery life is a concern.

Btw, my laptop exposes some ACPI/BIOS bugs related to brightness and some other aspects. These aren't going to be fixed, ever. Because it is proprietary blob. My AMD64 PC exposes other bugs in BIOS, causing boot sequence lock-ups if I hit buttons on keyboard at "wrong" time and BIOS also spends more time than the rest of boot sequence, which is a fucking shame for BIOS vendor. I have really low opinion about software engineering skills of proprietary bios/uefi vendors.

Sorry, but I really like how my ARM devices are booting these days. Boot loader gets lost in about a second and does not interferes with something at all, hence order of magnitude less bugs. Not to mention I have tight control over each and every aspect and everything could be fixed if I have got a source. I value this, and I've got used to this level of control over my systems.

[bridgman]

I didn't think Kaveri had PSP either, but not 100% sure.

[drSeehas]

... As for AMD processors, are all processors pre-2013 unaffected by PSP? I only glanced at some processor year list, but it looks like the FX-8350 is fine? ...

Yes, all socket AM3+, C32, G34 processors (Vishera, Delhi etc.) are fine.

Talos looks quite interesting. The current interest price is pretty out of my league though, but I'd enjoy the idea of that being available and hopefully a cheaper version of it eventually.

As for AMD processors, are all processors pre-2013 unaffected by PSP? I only glanced at some processor year list, but it looks like the FX-8350 is fine? Does the PSP show up as a device driver, and can it be checked whether or not it exists with lspci or something?

[drSeehas]

... So if I would need new laptop like 5 years later, ...

I am talking/writing about today, you are talking/writing about the future 5 years later.
Which laptop with at least 4 core Kabini performance do you recommend today?

[SystemCrasher]

You can still buy Kabini (without PSP) based laptops.

There're some issues I can see:
1) This approach isn't future proof. So if I would need new laptop like 5 years later, I'm not sure I would like used or refurbished hardware as the only option.
2) Even then, they come with nasty BLOB BIOS/UEFI crap. These tend to be plagued by nasty bugs nobody is going to fix, pose threat to security and privacy and Libreboot/Coreboot are very unlikely to support laptops due to fact laptops are very custom and entirely undocumented.
3) Laptops usually involve quite nasty and quite bugged EC, doing some critical tasks, like keyboard scan, power management and battery management, eventually exposing really nasty or bugged attitude. ECs running unknown blob of questionable quality could easily expose really arcane bugs which are extremely hard to pinpoint and virtually impossible to fix.

So it seems it isn't long term solution and in long term ... it seems it better have to be open hardware. I'm really happy to see these processes are spinning up, so I think I would not need hardware from treacherous bastards eventually.

[karolherbst]

I meant that Nvidia will not be selling that old GPUs you were talking about anymore when Talos will reach market.

well nvidia still dold kind of new fermi cards in the 800M series: 820M, 810M and also the 700 had some. And I am sure the 1000 will still have keplers and maxwell gen1. Which is all still newer then the blob free AMD/Intel CPUs.

[darkbasic]

I am pretty sure, that nouveau runs on POWER systems with normal "PC" versions of nvidias. I might be wrong though.

I meant that Nvidia will not be selling that old GPUs you were talking about anymore when Talos will reach market.

[SpyroRyder]

This might be a good time to mention a fully open source processor, implementing the free open instruction set RISC-V:

https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2016/03/open-source-microprocessor.html

http://www.pulp-platform.org/

http://riscv.org/

And open source GPU:

http://miaowgpu.org/

Now having an BIOS/UEFI alternative and platform specification would allow to start building completely open source hardware systems.

Being a standard, and a pretty reasonable one aside from secure boot, we don't so much need an alternative to UEFI as we need an open implementation. Coreboot has one (not sure if libreboot also uses that module) but there are limited boards that support coreboot