Maybe it is time to rethink how computers are built?
For example, that the kernel is running on a dedicated cpu, with dedicated cache and memory.
Is it time for open processors?
71–80 of 236 posts
Re: Is it time for open processors?
#72The problem is less about openness itself and more about quality of auditing. Open isn't a magic bullet. As I understand, these latest CPU vulnerabilities were in the spec themselves. You could've found them by reading the manual. See what good that did us. But I posit that open projects do better with audits than closed because they are more likely to have open audits as well, and an open audit is harder to ignore o…
I'd pay good money for an open and simpler platform to run my security-critical tasks that don't require top performance. Auditing a modern high-end CPU is probably a huge task even if you have access to the HDL because of how complex they are. A simpler design (RISC, no out-of-order execution, basic branch prediction and prefetching...) ought to be fast enough with modern lithography to browse the web, send emails and do 99% of my daily tasks except maybe compile C++ or Rust code.
The problem of course is that it's probably a very niche market at the moment. Most people probably don't really understand what's at stake and might not even care either way. As such I don't expect that people could manufacture open CPUs and sell them at a reasonable price. So you'd end up with overpriced, under-powered CPUs which won't drive adoption.
I can't imagine such a project being successful if it's not backed by a big company or a government. I kind of wish the European Union would try its hand at it, after all computing is absolutely critical these days (and it's only going to get more critical as time passes) yet we're completely dependent on american and chinese companies to provide us with CPUs. If the EU thought that Galileo was worthwhile to have our own positioning system certainly it also makes sense to have our own CPUs for critical tasks?
Re: Is it time for open processors?
#73Open Processors is a very bad idea. Look at what's happening to Android. The same thing will happen with CPU's. Every OEM will fork the open design and put all of their stupidity inside it in the name of features and security. Bugs like Spectre and Meltdown will become commonplace. The entire time of kernel devs will be spent working around the various 'features' of the OEM designs. Then someone will come up with a J…
Is not ARM open (but you need a license to build it) ? There are several ARM variants (Qualcomm, Samsung, even Apple) even today.
> you need a license to build it
That's the opposite of "open".
Re: Is it time for open processors?
#74Open Processors is a very bad idea. Look at what's happening to Android. The same thing will happen with CPU's. Every OEM will fork the open design and put all of their stupidity inside it in the name of features and security. Bugs like Spectre and Meltdown will become commonplace. The entire time of kernel devs will be spent working around the various 'features' of the OEM designs. Then someone will come up with a J…
Nonsense. OEM can buy ARM "IP" and jam it into a SoC with plenty of poorly designed tweaks and additional devices and it's not happening. Also, open does not mean that random changes are allowed as part of the original design. You can have a license that prevents using the original name of a CPU on modified versions.
> SoC with plenty of poorly designed tweaks and additional devices and it's not happening
It's called Qualcomm.
Re: Is it time for open processors?
#75Open Processors is a very bad idea. Look at what's happening to Android. The same thing will happen with CPU's. Every OEM will fork the open design and put all of their stupidity inside it in the name of features and security. Bugs like Spectre and Meltdown will become commonplace. The entire time of kernel devs will be spent working around the various 'features' of the OEM designs. Then someone will come up with a J…
This is nonsense.
What you describe is the current state of affairs for CPUs. Intel, AMD, ARM, and every other company working in this space already "put all of their stupidity inside it in the name of features and security". These companies will continue to "put all of their stupidity inside" their products as long as innovation continues.
As Spectre and Meltdown demonstrated, bugs like these occurred in almost every CPU that allows speculative execution. Open projects will simply address these bugs as they are discovered just as private companies do for their proprietary design. Openness is orthogonal to this class of bugs.
> The entire time of kernel devs will be spent working around the various 'features' of the OEM designs.
No they wont. If a CPU spec is implemented by a large number of vendors, kernel devs will (must?) treat their support as they treat peripherals: They will provide support for the baseline CPU as is described in the open spec. Additional support is supplied either by the manufacturer or by volunteers who want to take advantage of additional features.
> But putting everything up on GitHub is a recipe for disaster.
I'll gladly take fragmentation if it means that we are no longer forced to accept ME, PSP, or TrustZone. Competition and diversity is a good thing. It's having only closed CPUs that's the recipe for disaster.
Re: Is it time for open processors?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
No - open source is a specific case of the general rule that there is no such thing as a silver bullet :) But it does make possible a bunch of superior workflows that are impossible with proprietary software, and makes certain types of failure common to propriety software much harder.
I am yet to see any open source project subjected to the same high quality workflows as commercial propriety software targeted for high integrity computing deployment. Could you provide an example?
Does this qualify?
Re: Is it time for open processors?
#77The problem is less about openness itself and more about quality of auditing. Open isn't a magic bullet. As I understand, these latest CPU vulnerabilities were in the spec themselves. You could've found them by reading the manual. See what good that did us. But I posit that open projects do better with audits than closed because they are more likely to have open audits as well, and an open audit is harder to ignore o…
I'd pay good money for an open and simpler platform to run my security-critical tasks that don't require top performance. Auditing a modern high-end CPU is probably a huge task even if you have access to the HDL because of how complex they are. A simpler design (RISC, no out-of-order execution, basic branch prediction and prefetching...) ought to be fast enough with modern lithography to browse the web, send emails a…
> A simpler design (RISC, no out-of-order execution, basic branch prediction and prefetching...) ought to be fast enough with modern lithography to browse the web
I used a couple of Single Board Computers as my main computers for a while a couple of years back and it was really quite painful. Especially web browsing.
Re: Is it time for open processors?
#78The problem is less about openness itself and more about quality of auditing. Open isn't a magic bullet. As I understand, these latest CPU vulnerabilities were in the spec themselves. You could've found them by reading the manual. See what good that did us. But I posit that open projects do better with audits than closed because they are more likely to have open audits as well, and an open audit is harder to ignore o…
I'd pay good money for an open and simpler platform to run my security-critical tasks that don't require top performance. Auditing a modern high-end CPU is probably a huge task even if you have access to the HDL because of how complex they are. A simpler design (RISC, no out-of-order execution, basic branch prediction and prefetching...) ought to be fast enough with modern lithography to browse the web, send emails a…
There are many open source processors that are available for synthesis on FPGA's (see opencores.org). The cost/effort of deployment is just much higher.
Re: Is it time for open processors?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd pay good money for an open and simpler platform to run my security-critical tasks that don't require top performance. Auditing a modern high-end CPU is probably a huge task even if you have access to the HDL because of how complex they are. A simpler design (RISC, no out-of-order execution, basic branch prediction and prefetching...) ought to be fast enough with modern lithography to browse the web, send emails a…
> A simpler design (RISC, no out-of-order execution, basic branch prediction and prefetching...) ought to be fast enough with modern lithography to browse the web I used a couple of Single Board Computers as my main computers for a while a couple of years back and it was really quite painful. Especially web browsing.
The web (by that I mean most browsers and most web pages) is designed for hi-end devices. Text-based browsing also ought to be possible, but often doesn't work well in practice because it's not a common use case, and so it's not something that developers consider in the design process.
Re: Is it time for open processors?
#80Maybe it is time to rethink how computers are built? For example, that the kernel is running on a dedicated cpu, with dedicated cache and memory.
I agree, the single, superfast CPU model is outdated. It's a shame that multiprocessor programming is hard (or is it? It might also just be a vicious circle: 'not many people do MPP because the facilities suck because not many people do MPP').