Open Source Software Community - it's about ethics in Code of Conducts

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Betonhaus said:
How advanced are FPGAs? Could someone make an open source Pentium III level cpu somehow?
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It really depends on what you define as an FPGA. You'll find FPAG fabric as part of an SOC with a really powerful ARM core. But you might as well just buy the processor without the fabric at that point.
As for a soft-IP processor, you could pull off a 300MHz ARM processor in the fabric of one of Xilinx's fast parts. Artix 7 200k CLBs Speed 3 (A7200T-3) would probably fit the bill at around $400.

To answer your question, probably, it depends how high your budget is. FPGAs are pretty wasteful due to their configurability, so you'll need to shoot way over the performance you're actually going to get.. I'm skeptical if any present day sub $1000 pure-fabric FPGA could pull off 400MHz fully featured x86, if nothing else due to how much logic x86 requires, regardless of performance.

There's a recent push to RISC processors due to the open source standard (license free make automotive smile) and being more space efficient, that might work well. Do you know of any OS that can run on RISC?
 
Is there any way to cobble together a lithography process to make your own cpu, even if it has like massive gates and a millimeter gate size?
 
Jotch said:
It really depends on what you define as an FPGA. You'll find FPAG fabric as part of an SOC with a really powerful ARM core. But you might as well just buy the processor without the fabric at that point.
As for a soft-IP processor, you could pull off a 300MHz ARM processor in the fabric of one of Xilinx's fast parts. Artix 7 200k CLBs Speed 3 (A7200T-3) would probably fit the bill at around $400.

To answer your question, probably, it depends how high your budget is. FPGAs are pretty wasteful due to their configurability, so you'll need to shoot way over the performance you're actually going to get.. I'm skeptical if any present day sub $1000 pure-fabric FPGA could pull off 400MHz fully featured x86, if nothing else due to how much logic x86 requires, regardless of performance.

There's a recent push to RISC processors due to the open source standard (license free make automotive smile) and being more space efficient, that might work well. Do you know of any OS that can run on RISC?
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Multiple Linux distros work on RISC-V, but you're stuck with weak cpus and limited software support.
 
Betonhaus said:
How advanced are FPGAs? Could someone make an open source Pentium III level cpu somehow?
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Leaving the technical aspects aside, FPGA toolchains are proprietary horror blobs so it's questionable how open-source this'd really be. There are some whose toolchains are reversed, but those just stop being produced because the toolchain jewry is a big part of how FPGA companies make money.
 
306h4Ge5eJUJ said:
Leaving the technical aspects aside, FPGA toolchains are proprietary horror blobs so it's questionable how open-source this'd really be. There are some whose toolchains are reversed, but those just stop being produced because the toolchain jewry is a big part of how FPGA companies make money.
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our only hope is exquisitely etched powerpc/riscv cores made with love in the darkest kiwi farms fabrication basements; Special™ chips, made by autists, for autists
all of the firmware would be licensed under the gpl3 instead of being ABSOLUTELY PROPRIETARY and instead of a gay glow coprocessor it will have a "City Slicker Control Module" that you can configure to insert the word "NIGGER" into unused bytes of your network message no matter what operating system you use
and the isa should have special instructions for implementing holyc, various lisp dialects, and accelerated post-quantum cryptography
 
Mikoyan said:
And a 'classic mode' that converts strings of 'retarded' to 'exceptional'.
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that would probably cause a lot of random kernel panics if critical kernel data structs ended up with the ascii bytes for "retarded" to "exceptional"
this functionality would work well in the CSCM's introspective packet niggermarking system

however i fully support overwriting memory saying "touch th‌e poo" with "pozload my neghole" because that string is a bit longer so it's probably not as bad right
 
Jotch said:
Ive always been skeptical of all of the "buy old stuff" pushes, because those are fundamentally in limited supply and out of production.
We gotta find ways to make good things out of modern stuff or to make this old stuff ourselves. It's a lot harder but much better longevity.
IE the old "Buy an old IBM thinkpad" is tenuous even today, imagine 20 years from now.
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A lol of older phones won't even work on modern networks. Older GSM and CDMA is gone from much of the world. Even older LTE devices that no longer get updates might have trouble connecting to current LTE networks.

I met someone in 2012 who still had an original EDGE 1st Gen iPhone. He could no longer connect to any cell network with a sim card. It only connected over Wi-Fi, but it was still his only device (I met him traveling in a hostel in Australia. There is something special in the idea of traveling in the modern era without an instant always connected map in your pocket).

I wish we had Linux phones, but I never got my Pinephone in a usable state and Purism is a shit company that's still holding hundreds of peoples' pre-order money hostage, so they can go die in a fire. I just use a LineageOS phone with zero Gapps/Gservices. I rarely load anything from Auora store.

The trouble with any Linux phone is the cameras in any Samsung/Sony/Pixel are really nice. The Sony camera apps mimic their cameras and can be sideloaded without any Gservices/Sony bloat. I literally have nothing else on my phone. I have zero of the big social media accounts. I use it for texts, podcast, music and ocasionally the camera.

If ARM wasn't a non existant architecture we might have real alternative OSes for phones. As it stands, they're all random shit soldered to random pins with zero standardization and custom images needed for every possible device. PostmarketOS has made some progress, but we're still far off from seeing truly general base kernels for cellphones in the same we we do for x86/PC laptops.
 
HootersMcBoobies said:
The trouble with any Linux phone is the cameras in any Samsung/Sony/Pixel are really nice.
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That they are. I'm a camera guy and they've killed any real desire for me to have a small point and shoot.

And the rest of your post is spot on. Also the lack of agreement over the years for how to go about 'a linux phone'. I had Maemo/Meego stuff though not the full phone, I liked that okay but it wasn't great for anyone non-technical. Firefox OS and the mobile Ubuntu really didn't go anywhere. All of them was of course a different thing from each other. I have some of the Planet Computing devices and Linux on them is even clunkier. SoC standardization would help, as you say.
 
Creative Username said:
that you can configure to insert the word "NIGGER" into unused bytes of your network message
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There are a lot of places in the protocol stack where you have either unused or padding bytes or even outright optional fields that are sometimes even under the applications control.

For example in IPv4 you have the header option "Security" (rfc791 page17). Which for example takes 9 bytes of whatever random data you want to tag your IP packets with.
Now off to see if there is a suitable setsockopt() call where we can provide the 9 byte "security label" a.k.a. the string "NIGGER "

EDIT: Yeah, someone just needs to write a small LD_PRELOAD that intercepts the call to socket and adds the appropriate calls to :
setsockopt(sock, IPPROTO_IP, IP_OPTIONS, ...
adding the Security option contatining the string NIGGER should do the trick.
 
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Betonhaus said:
How advanced are FPGAs? Could someone make an open source Pentium III level cpu somehow?
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IIRC there was a Pentium (the first) core for MiSTer but I doubt it could handle a PIII as the Aptera chip can't even handle a Dreamcast.
HootersMcBoobies said:
I wish we had Linux phones, but I never got my Pinephone in a usable state and Purism is a shit company that's still holding hundreds of peoples' pre-order money hostage, so they can go die in a fire. I just use a LineageOS phone with zero Gapps/Gservices. I rarely load anything from Auora store.
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Did you try Sailfish tho?
Mikoyan said:
Firefox OS and the mobile Ubuntu really didn't go anywhere
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fOS tried to make a cheapo smartphone and failed because the hardware was still too expensive for sale in poor countries yet too crap for rich countries. And ubuntu made the huge mistake of trying to get it out with their own flagship-grade expensive custom phone instead of just a ROM for existing phones like the Nexus. They could've bought a bunch of Xiaomi phones from back then which had insane specs for the price and just resell them with ubuntu OS, but no they had to have their own phone...
 
Cuckoman said:
EDIT: Yeah, someone just needs to write a small LD_PRELOAD that intercepts the call to socket and adds the appropriate calls
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the kf "sneed lake" processor microarchitecture would be able to do this in ring -3
Cuckoman said:
a.k.a. the string "NIGGER "
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why not "NIGGERFAG" because you can fit the short form of another slur in those extra 3 bytes after a "nigger" (6 bytes)
 
HootersMcBoobies said:
If ARM wasn't a non existant architecture we might have real alternative OSes for phones. As it stands, they're all random shit soldered to random pins with zero standardization and custom images needed for every possible device. PostmarketOS has made some progress, but we're still far off from seeing truly general base kernels for cellphones in the same we we do for x86/PC laptops.
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I think you can add Smart TVs to this list too. I think Android t.v.s aren't as locked down as Amazon ones, but I'm not familiar with the ability to custom load an O.S. for them.
 
Coolio55 said:
Anyway, his comments about Tim Cook are interesting. He's simply a holding pattern CEO and his legacy is the Vision Pro.
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All of the best stuff that Apple has produced was well underway during the Jobs era, including the M1 macs. Tim Cook is the luckiest CEO on earth, inheriting such an incredible legacy from Jobs while having hardly any intelligent competition.
Tremolo said:
The prospect of a dumb phone is looking better every day
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Lots of the 'dumb' phones are just running Android too. There's no escape.
 
Have a Lunduke dump


Phoronix: Intel Loses One Of Its USB4 / Thunderbolt Linux Driver Maintainers (archive)
 
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teriyakiburns said:
The closest we get right now is postmarketos on older hardware.
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PostmarketOS is unfortunately full steam ahead on the fast train to troontown.

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