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System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open-Source Firmware

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Re: System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open-Source Firmware

#81

Post by pgeorgi »

hlandau wrote: post #75
pgeorgi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I implemented OF over 15 years ago, and even back then the OF trademark had lapsed. Just tried again and I can't seem to find it.

And? (TM) is used to denote unregistered trademarks, as opposed to (R) for registered trademarks. Which is in any case irrelevant. Open Firmware != open firmware.

The Open Firmware Working Group's website at https://www.devicetree.org/open-firmware/home.html mentions the OpenBoot(tm) trademark, but uses Open Firmware without any signifier. (and they should know)

Given that there's apparently no protection at all, I see no reason why I'd have to adhere to your wish to use 1275's way of writing O and F in upper case. So yes, I _can_ call it open firmware.

Re: System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open-Source Firmware

#82

Post by jokoon »

jackpot51 wrote: post #3

I am Jeremy Soller, Principal Engineer at System76. Let me know if you have any questions. The source for this can be found here: https://github.com/system76/firmware-open There are instructions there for building and testing the firmware in QEMU, you do not need to have our hardware to try it out.

How durable are those laptops when compared to other brands? Do you engineer those laptop a little like ibm did for thinkpads (if I remember, some of them had military rating for dust, temperature etc)? How repairable are they?

How difficult was it for those companies to provide components that were OSS friendly? What is the main hurdle? Does it increase costs? Did you experience fightback from providers to make this project happen?

Re: System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open-Source Firmware

#83

Post by throwaway2048 »

yellowapple wrote: post #48
awinter-py wrote: post #11

BYO software is my #3 consumer electronics question (after form factor & 'does it work at all') and drivers are an important frontier of this. SO TIRED of downloading blobs to have wifi on linux. AFAIK there isn't even a usb wifi dongle that has an open source wifi driver, much less a commercial wifi chipset. even companies that are in theory dedicated to quality are teetering on the edge of using software to enable…

Atheros chipsets tend to not require any non-free code (be it on the driver or firmware side), including their USB wifi dongles. I've had mediocre (at best) experiences with them, however, what with frequent stability and signal strength issues on what I'm pretty sure to be the hardware side (though I've found this is true of pretty much every wifi chipset out there, so I guess it's okay relatively-speaking).

This used to be true, but since Qualcomm bought them out, they have done a complete 180 and basically reverted to totally closed designs (closed firmware, closed drivers, no spec sheet). The 9xxx chip-sets (which are only 802.11n) are the last ones designed before Qualcomm took over, the 10xxx chip-sets (802.11AC+) are closed and completely locked down, you cant even change your MAC address its all stuffed into a giant psuedo-driver firmware blob.

Re: System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open-Source Firmware

#84

Post by hlandau »

pgeorgi wrote: post #81
hlandau wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? (TM) is used to denote unregistered trademarks, as opposed to (R) for registered trademarks. Which is in any case irrelevant. Open Firmware != open firmware.

The Open Firmware Working Group's website at https://www.devicetree.org/open-firmware/home.html mentions the OpenBoot(tm) trademark, but uses Open Firmware without any signifier. (and they should know) Given that there's apparently no protection at all, I see no reason why I'd have to adhere to your wish to use 1275's way of writing O and F in upper case. So yes, I _can_ call it open firmware.

I don't think you understand how this works. My calling it "Open Firmware" has nothing to do with its trademarked status. It is a proper noun.

Open Firmware != open firmware.

Re: System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open-Source Firmware

#85

Post by shmerl »

hlandau wrote: post #76
shmerl wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works with coreboot though somehow. AGESA prevents it as far as I know, since it does some stuff that coreboot has to be doing. I'm not that familiar with details, may be some coreboot experts can comment.

Coreboot integrates plenty of blobs via its blobs repository, so "Coreboot builds" does not imply "blob-free".

Then AGESA must be posing some problem for it.

Re: System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open-Source Firmware

#86

Post by pgeorgi »

shmerl wrote: post #73
hlandau wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel is equally blobby (FSP, ME).

Works with coreboot though somehow. AGESA prevents it as far as I know, since it does some stuff that coreboot has to be doing. I'm not that familiar with details, may be some coreboot experts can comment.

coreboot on modern Intel requires (some amount of) ME firmware (without which the x86 core wouldn't even turn on) + some parts of the Intel FSP binaries.

coreboot on modern AMD requires (some amount of) PSP firmware (without which the x86 core wouldn't even turn on) + some parts of AGESA which were most recently shipped as "BinaryPI".

The situation is comparable, just that Intel has ~7 years of dealing with coreboot through Chromebooks now, while AMD dropped the ball after a great start and only picked it up again recently. If AMD sticks to the current trajectory, Intel and AMD would be similarly well supported in coreboot (with a similar amount of blobs required) at some point in the near future.

If you're aiming for fully blob-free operations, look for chips not newer than the early 90s. If you can live with not having loadable blobs (while boot ROMs on the CPU die are acceptable), that extends into the late 2000's, but requires some care when selecting your gear.

I wouldn't put any hopes on RISC-V when it comes to avoiding blobs because all higher performance variants will use the same "strings attached" high performance memory and bus controller function blocks whose developers will mandate a certain level of blobbiness.

Re: System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open-Source Firmware

#87

Post by m463 »

awinter-py wrote: post #11

BYO software is my #3 consumer electronics question (after form factor & 'does it work at all') and drivers are an important frontier of this. SO TIRED of downloading blobs to have wifi on linux. AFAIK there isn't even a usb wifi dongle that has an open source wifi driver, much less a commercial wifi chipset. even companies that are in theory dedicated to quality are teetering on the edge of using software to enable…

I bought a purism laptop years ago, and it had zero blobs. It also had really really standard hardware: no special screws to open the case, standard memory, m.2 and hard drive, a standard power supply with a barrel jack, etc.

I believe system76 was less expensive but had blobs. Unsure about the hardware details.

Re: System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open-Source Firmware

#88

Post by pgeorgi »

yellowapple wrote: post #43
jdright wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why no AMD CPUs? I just don't buy anything Intel and I'm for some time looking at System76, but each time I go build a setup I remember why I gave up the last time around. Also, with the price difference between the two it would be a more interesting hardware using this difference to acquire more RAM.

Relatedly: why no AMD GPUs? AMD's much more cooperative with Linux than Nvidia is or probably ever will be at this rate, and performance is great even with the FOSS drivers (as I've observed on both my Dell Precision 7510 and the Threadripper + Radeon rig I built about a year ago). Like, it's kinda maddening that "the" household name in Linux laptops (if there is such a thing) has zero laptops with an AMD GPU as an o…

AMD GPUs require AtomBIOS which contains bytecode (that is: blobs) to initialize the GPU. If you look at the Linux drivers, they come with an AtomBIOS bytecode interpreter for that purpose.

There was some confrontation over that 10 years ago or so (see radeon vs. radeonhd drivers, one point of view is described at https://libv.livejournal.com/27799.html) and the people in charge of Linux GPU drivers decided to go with AtomBIOS.

Re: System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open-Source Firmware

#89

Post by isantop »

albertzeyer wrote: post #56

Recently there was a discussion about Huawei MateBook X Pro, which also seems to be a great Linux notebook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21170765 In that discussion, several other good Linux notebooks were also discussed, including System 76. But it was reported there that the quality is quite bad: > but the quality is reportedly bad (flaky hardware, too-fast power drain, reflash bios to toggle discrete graph…

It's worth noting that stories like this are the extreme minority of cases. We have a great many customers and the overwhelming majority of computers we sell live out their entire (long) lives without any sort of incident, major or minor. However, when someone buys a computer and everything works as expected, that's not really all that notable because there's nothing interesting about that, and so you don't really here a ton of "works as expected" stories to counteract the negative ones.

I can't really find more than maybe 10-20 unique public cases of a System76 computer having serious problems. I don't want to toot our horns too much here, but that's just not very many people compared to our entire userbase. We're a company with the resources to develop open source firmware; it takes a lot more support from your customers than could be afforded by 10-20 (or 100, 1000, etc.) people to do that.

If you look hard enough, it's not hard to find examples of any computer manufacturer having issues with occasional units. That's just the nature of manufactured products (especially high-tech electronics). No company has a 0% failure rate, and any that claims to is lying. However, you can be reasonably certain that any company that's been around for a decade and a half (or longer) has a lot fewer failures than successes

Re: System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open-Source Firmware

#90

Post by [deleted] »

jokoon wrote: post #82
jackpot51 wrote: post #3

I am Jeremy Soller, Principal Engineer at System76. Let me know if you have any questions. The source for this can be found here: https://github.com/system76/firmware-open There are instructions there for building and testing the firmware in QEMU, you do not need to have our hardware to try it out.

How durable are those laptops when compared to other brands? Do you engineer those laptop a little like ibm did for thinkpads (if I remember, some of them had military rating for dust, temperature etc)? How repairable are they? How difficult was it for those companies to provide components that were OSS friendly? What is the main hurdle? Does it increase costs? Did you experience fightback from providers to make this…

[deleted]
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