Putting out the hardware dumpster fire
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Putting out the hardware dumpster fire
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Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire
#2[flagged]
Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire
#3From the abstract:
> The immense hardware complexity of modern computers, both mobile phones and datacenter servers, is a seemingly endless source of bugs and vulnerabilities in system software.
> Classical OSes cannot address this, since they only run on a small subset of the machine. The issue is interactions within the entire ensemble of firmware blobs, co-processors, and CPUs that we term the de facto OS. The current “whac-a-mole” approach will not solve this problem, nor will clean-slate redesign: it is simply not possible to replace some firmware components and the engineering effort is too great.
Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire
#4[deleted]
Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire
#5One long-term project I’m planning is actually a fully open source desktop computing platform. While originally meant as a learning project, I realized a few years ago Ben Eater[0] has done this in a way far superior to anything I could create myself, so I started focusing on very basic hardware, beginning with power supplies. My goal ultimately is to select a processor that is as close to open source as possible, design a motherboard around it, make it fast enough to be suitable for general purpose uses, design a PSU, daughter boards (hot swap SATA backplane, I/O ports), a few PCIe x16 lanes, and ultimately a custom graphics card.
Designing the motherboard is surprisingly easy, the way PCIe is setup makes routing high speed connections fairly straightforward, and most I/O chips are just some sort of bus input and the interface output. The hardest part is finding the ICs that actually have good documentation not locked behind an NDA, or have good alternatives as one of my criteria is that every chip I select must have a pin-for-pin drop in replacement available. 6gbs SATA is the hardest one to source. I suspect this problem only will compound if I ever get to creating a graphics card.
[0]: https://eater.net/
Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire
#6Here's a Usenix presentation by the last author, Timothy Roscoe, from August, 2021 on YouTube. [1]
He makes a very compelling case for greatly expanding the concept of an operating system into all of the hardware in a given computing environment.
Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire
#7I thought that when the Intel Management Engine implementation details (hidden Minix!) were released that it would only be a matter of time for a "Full FOSS" movement within enthusiast communities.
I was wrong, it seems.
There hasn't even been a push for an affordable 802.3ab gigabit ethernet card with an FPGA.
Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire
#8One long-term project I’m planning is actually a fully open source desktop computing platform. While originally meant as a learning project, I realized a few years ago Ben Eater[0] has done this in a way far superior to anything I could create myself, so I started focusing on very basic hardware, beginning with power supplies. My goal ultimately is to select a processor that is as close to open source as possible, de…
This is something I'm also working on, but using off the shelf hardware for now and working on the OS first[0]. I'm going for something lower spec and portable for now, mostly because there are a fair number of relatively well documented RISC-V processors these days (the single core, 1 GHz C906 CPU inside the SoC probably technically counts as open source!), where it seems feasible to write drivers. I'm not sure it would be a wonderful "full desktop" solution (it's close to the original Pi Zero in terms of performance), but I hope to target larger chips as the OS gets more mature. The i.MX8 they mention in the research paper is actually one of the ones I've considered, it's also used by the MNT Reform (definitely worth a look if you haven't seen it before, and are designing your own larger scale computer!), and the Librem 5 (which I got after many years of waiting, and don't have a ton of use for right now).
I actually would like to eventually play around with treating all the "hardware bits" inside of the computer, like the wifi chip, graphics card, etc., more like a distributed system than black boxes, but this generally comes down to writing a lot of the firmware myself (luckily this is a hobby/research project, so "non viable" solutions are still on the table).
The more immediate goal for me is something portable, and comparable to a palm pilot/blackberry in terms of performance and capabilities. The current hardware will likely have an ESP32C3 for wifi (32-bit RISC-V), the main D1 CPU (64-bit RISC-V), and an RP2040 (32-bit Arm Cortex-M) for keyboard and IO, so I'll be able to test out some of my "network of tiny computers that make one small computer" ideas.
Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire
#9I like the boldness of the title and the simple clarity of the writing.
Academic papers are frustrating to me in that they seem to use esoteric language in order to create a veneer of importance, sometimes above trivial real content.
This stands against that trend and harkens back to papers of old.
Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire
#10One long-term project I’m planning is actually a fully open source desktop computing platform. While originally meant as a learning project, I realized a few years ago Ben Eater[0] has done this in a way far superior to anything I could create myself, so I started focusing on very basic hardware, beginning with power supplies. My goal ultimately is to select a processor that is as close to open source as possible, de…
This is something I'm also working on, but using off the shelf hardware for now and working on the OS first[0]. I'm going for something lower spec and portable for now, mostly because there are a fair number of relatively well documented RISC-V processors these days (the single core, 1 GHz C906 CPU inside the SoC probably technically counts as open source!), where it seems feasible to write drivers. I'm not sure it w…
I love this concept and is why my current designs are littered with E-keyed M.2 ports and the only real I/O is on my board are USB-C and a few USB-As. The advantage is that I can supplement built-in peripherals with USB devices until I build them.