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Can someone explain this "Purism" thing? I understand that they are trying to build laptops with secure components. But they are using Intel processors. What about Intel ME? There is some workaround or they just let it be?
I think the summary is: it's hard but they're working on it, and they think they can disable it.
I am continually amazed that computers manage to work at all.
An alternate explanation is that most this code is written by electrical engineers that while smart, don't quite have enough experience managing larger code projects yet and are still prone to some of the newbie software developer mistakes, and probably without good mentoring on that front because those that have already weathered this storm and learned enough to sail through smoothly have either jumped ship for greener pastures or been promoted enough to be out of the trenches but not enough to have sway to fix the problem.
That was a very disappointing article. The issue was not solved, and the workaround has no reason to work other than it does, meaning that it could also stop working anytime. i am not sure how anyone with a clear conscience could ship a device which works by accident
LOL, welcome to enterprise level "Ship now, the service contract gives us at least a few weeks to work out the kinks" hardware, where understanding how the whole system actually works is a luxury most the engineers don't even have.
Kudos to them for giving it a good shot and continuing to look. A lot of times, unless you have money or clout to throw at some of the component originators, you're out of luck if you want real answers. The few engineers that have them are probably so busy that to devote them to figuring out what's really going on isn't worthwhile for the companies without some higher level intervention..
I am continually amazed that computers manage to work at all.
Every time I've had to deal with troubleshooting weird firmware or hardware (and good luck sometimes knowing which it is), I've been continually amazed at the giant mess that's being pushed as commercial or "enterprise" equipment. It appears every product enters a special phase of a few weeks to a few months right before shipping where time constraints force whoever is responsible for the code to wildly shovel crap f…
If there is something they can't fix, it goes back to the core guys who are already busy working on the new project and can only dedicate so much time to addressing this issue.
Even early SDRAM controllers had similar tunable settings for clock delays and such, because different DIMMs may vary slightly --- upon POST, the BIOS would set all the settings to nominal values, then nudge each one in one direction while reading/writing pathological data until errors occurred; then nudge them in the other direction until errors occurred, and finally settle on the average of the two extremes. I suspect a similar process needs to be done here, and if you reverse-engineered the BIOS further you would find the algorithm to do it.
More interesting information on DTLE "discrete time linear equalization" here: http://cc.ee.ntu.edu.tw/~rbwu/rapid_content/course/highspeed...
Big kudos to the Purism folks for trying to figure these things out. And big fuckings to Intel for keeping this stuff NDA'd --- it only makes it harder for those trying to buy and use your products (I hope someone leaks it all eventually...)
I am continually amazed that computers manage to work at all.
As Andrew "bunnie" Huang once said, "You are not storing data, you are storing probabilistic approximation of your data."[1]
That being said, analog effects have been noticeable at the software level for a while; here's another example: https://www.linusakesson.net/scene/safevsp/
Can someone explain this "Purism" thing? I understand that they are trying to build laptops with secure components. But they are using Intel processors. What about Intel ME? There is some workaround or they just let it be?
Interesting question. They have a page about it here: https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/ I think the summary is: it's hard but they're working on it, and they think they can disable it.
Perhaps they could work together on this.
At least, they are trying to keep the promise of coreboot part(It's coreboot not libreboot or librecore so it must contains binary blob firmware... still better than nothing)