We need someone to produce HW that CAN be opened
What we need is hardware that CAN be opened. There are a lot of small devices out there selling to markets smaller than the Linux market for GPU's. Selling us HW that supports DRM and which we have to reverse engineer gives us an incentive to attack the DRM code while we are at it. Nvidia may pay for that one. I could see their fancy card running with their signed firmware loaded-and another, second layer added just above it that alters the functions of some gates to defeat their DRM. We have the binary code and can open it in a hex editor. We can also examine all inputs vs all outputs do determine equivalent bare hardware with the same published command set. Finally, this combined with binary examination of the firmware could work out what is HW and what is firmware that can be changed.
A lot of us would settle for a card made from an FGPA to be unrelated to any other card, and unable to keep up with any paid game. Cards have had enough power to play the Linux games for many years, look how well the old (but power hogging) Nvidia Gt9800+ ran on Nouveau with clocks all the way up. Using an FGPA would make the card cheap to make-or someone could offer it as a hobbyist kit to get into a different market and not be expected to be able to play DRM'ed movied and games. Remember, those who object to microcode being kept secret usually also object to paid games and don't subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, etc.
As I've said before, the way things are going I suspect that whole computers will have to be made from FGPA's just to defeat locked boot in the future. Big servers will always be able to run Linux but might end up locked to RHEL or Ubuntu LTS.
Until that time, how about independent security audits of the hardware and the microcode, hell of the drivers too under NDA by security experts in mutually opposing camps? From where I sit that is the main objection to secret hardware or firmware, regardless of how loaded. In the meantime, things like watching network activity in Wireshark for packets sent over the Internet to hardware makers is a deterrent to the "phone home" behavior feared by so many of us. Yes, I check this stuff myself. That's how I found out that Ubuntu's flashplugin installer has dependencies that phone home automatically, even if only to the package repo webpage. Another good reason not to use flash...
Originally posted by bridgman
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A lot of us would settle for a card made from an FGPA to be unrelated to any other card, and unable to keep up with any paid game. Cards have had enough power to play the Linux games for many years, look how well the old (but power hogging) Nvidia Gt9800+ ran on Nouveau with clocks all the way up. Using an FGPA would make the card cheap to make-or someone could offer it as a hobbyist kit to get into a different market and not be expected to be able to play DRM'ed movied and games. Remember, those who object to microcode being kept secret usually also object to paid games and don't subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, etc.
As I've said before, the way things are going I suspect that whole computers will have to be made from FGPA's just to defeat locked boot in the future. Big servers will always be able to run Linux but might end up locked to RHEL or Ubuntu LTS.
Until that time, how about independent security audits of the hardware and the microcode, hell of the drivers too under NDA by security experts in mutually opposing camps? From where I sit that is the main objection to secret hardware or firmware, regardless of how loaded. In the meantime, things like watching network activity in Wireshark for packets sent over the Internet to hardware makers is a deterrent to the "phone home" behavior feared by so many of us. Yes, I check this stuff myself. That's how I found out that Ubuntu's flashplugin installer has dependencies that phone home automatically, even if only to the package repo webpage. Another good reason not to use flash...
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