141–150 of 282 posts
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People have certainly done ME reverse engineering: http://me.bios.io/
>there is a little man inside your pc... and his thing is bigger than yours. Your wife knows this. I'm supposed to believe this technology is dangerous. But the advocates are children.
I've been looking into this recently. Basically, the things mentioned on the text, made free software bios and firmwares impossible, some of the free software projects that exist now are mostly "binary blobs loaders", having more binary blob than free software code running. There is some good analysis on why even Intel can't fix this if they wanted to, unless they stopped shipping some features entirely, their Intel…
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You have to start with a single step. Costs could go down over time.
While I agree with you, the average buyer of computer components is used to spending an order of magnitude less on a motherboard. A person can go to their usual source of computer parts and pick up a motherboard for a couple hundred USD at the high end. A few thousand USD for motherboard that does not offer an order of magnitude improvement in raw speed or expandability is going to be a very hard sell.
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This makes me wonder why we don't see sparc chips in things like routers or other hardware that doesn't require lots of binary compatibility from 3rd party software.
Because ARM and MIPS chips are a lot more power-efficient.
Far as power efficiency, kristoffer might be able to chime in as it's not in the data sheets for Gaisler. That's suspicious: either the numbers are bad or they leave it off given its meant for customization. Anyway, the Leon4...
http://www.gaisler.com/index.php/products/processors/leon4?t...
...uses 30,000 gates per core. Same ballpark as ARM and MIPS. Power use should be similar or at least acceptable if comparing ARM, MIPS, and Leon on same ASIC process. They often do rad-hard given it makes it resistant to SEU errors. That takes plenty of extra circuitry. Numbers I have for those, the high end, are 15mW per 1Mhz for Leon3RadHard and for Leon4RadHardQuadCore max was 6watts per one slideshow.
I'll take 6watts consumption in a router in exchange for quad-core, IOMMU-enabled, fault-tolerant, open CPU. What about you? Would 6 watts kill it for you?
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Because Oracle tends to be hostile towards anything open source? With such an attitude, why ever bother supporting their technologies?
SPARC is owned by SPARC International, a non-profit. Its specs and everything are open: http://sparc.org/technical-documents/ One embedded implementation with a ton of supporting I.P. is GPL'd, FPGA-proven, ASIC-proven, and rad-hard in some verisons: http://www.gaisler.com/index.php/downloads/leongrlib?task=vi... And then there's Oracle, their badass chips, and their evil ass lawyers. We can stay away from all that.…
ARM architectures also suffer from this. You'll be hard pressed to find a board that doesn't require a propriety board support package somewhere in the stack. Ironically, it is usually the bootloader that is/requires a blob or it is the DTB. I remember being in middle school and reading Stallman's articles on the dangers of a TPM-oriented push by manufacturers. As cliche as it is, Stallman was right. The push for pla…
I'm using ASUS C201 which uses ARM. It was a Chromebook, now running libreboot and parabola linux.
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One issue with PPC and POWER is that they're generally big-endian and everything assumes little-endian these days thanks to x86. Even JavaScript is little-endian now.
That's one of those sad realities of Worse is Better in action. Definitely a disadvantage. Far as why big-endian was The Right Thing, drfuchs had this to say: "Because big-endian matches how most humans have done it for most of history ("five hundred twenty one" is written "521" or "DXXI", not "125" or "IXXD"). Because the left-most bit in a byte is the high-order bit, so the left-most byte in a word should be the hi…
It's great that these guys pushing POWER8 at least have a workable situation, but at least for me, throwing $3,700 at a motherboard (Alone!) just isn't feasible. I would love to be free of proprietary firmware, but it would seem that's only for people better off than myself.
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That's one of those sad realities of Worse is Better in action. Definitely a disadvantage. Far as why big-endian was The Right Thing, drfuchs had this to say: "Because big-endian matches how most humans have done it for most of history ("five hundred twenty one" is written "521" or "DXXI", not "125" or "IXXD"). Because the left-most bit in a byte is the high-order bit, so the left-most byte in a word should be the hi…
It is not obvious whether big or little endian is better. For a nice overview read https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/little-endian-vs-bi...
And it's getting worse, SGX[1] allows 3rd party encrypted binary blobs to run on your CPU without being inspectable. It's sold as way to protect your secrets from malware. But it more likely will be used to run DRM code on the user's computer while treating the user as a hostile entity. [1] https://software.intel.com/en-us/sgx
SGX has the potential to be amazing though. With it you can build "trusted" applications. For example, a Bitcoin mixer that's provably secure. (Well as secure as trusting Intel and users not to be able to break the chip.)
That's generally a bad trade. Sadly one that many people are willing to make until it bites them.
It would be a lot better if secure mode had its own supervisor mode that worked through a master key that could be installed at boot time.