How hard is it to make firmware, CPU's and BiOS etc.

#1

Post by Clownshoesms » Tue, May 02, 2017, 8:39 AM UTC

I am personally of the opinion we cannot trust corporations to look after our best interests as a species. They will look after a handful of people to excess, but abuse the rest of the population for profit.

That said, is there any path forward for open source/free:

* CPUs * Motherboard BIOS/CMOS * Firmware in proprietary devices

Thoughts? Am I the only one getting a bit peeved with wealthy corps trampling on the tragedy of the commons and us as a species?

Re: How hard is it to make firmware, CPU's and BiOS etc.

#2

Post by ordu » Tue, May 02, 2017, 9:16 AM UTC

> Am I the only one getting a bit peeved with wealthy corps trampling on the tragedy of the commons and us as a species?

You can find more of your kind. Take a loot at libreboot, for example.

Re: How hard is it to make firmware, CPU's and BiOS etc.

#3

Post by p3trov94 » Tue, May 02, 2017, 9:31 AM UTC

I agree with you completely x

Re: How hard is it to make firmware, CPU's and BiOS etc.

#4

Post by CyberFonic » Tue, May 02, 2017, 10:29 AM UTC

You are not alone. The CoreBoot (https://www.coreboot.org/) project is maintained by programmers who would agree with you.

The main problem with opensource BIOS is the need to understand several proprietary interfaces.

As for the CPU, have a look at the RISC-V project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V). I have seen links to implementations but I can't find them at the moment.

You might want to consider systems built using ARM processors instead of Intel. There are several proprietary backdoors in Intel CPUs.

Re: How hard is it to make firmware, CPU's and BiOS etc.

#5

Post by brudgers » Tue, May 02, 2017, 3:23 PM UTC

It is very hard and very expensive to put a billion transistors on a chip.