- Joined
- May 14, 2024
Let's wash our mouth of the taste of debian and horrific pedophiles (that came out wrong...) at least until they re-offend.
The dumb answer is "no ROM chips" but if some vendor just etched the firmware into the main chip for whatever device using EUV lithography it's effectively the same thing as putting firmware in ROM (and much more expensive). On the other side trying to make everything FOSS isn't really possible unless we just start shipping FPGAs (also much more expensive and with their own bring up firmware similar to the IME, naturally) to everyone and you download acar network card which would be way too expensive.
So what's the right answer? All hardware comes with a complete verilog implementation? A set of fuzzing rules to make sure the hardware (ROM firmware or not) isn't backdoored? Tell me your thoughts, chayt.
And on a completely separate topic: Pulseaudio (pottering ware, but has been beaten into working-ish) or Pipewire (replace everything because it's better:tm: just like gayland). I would particularly like @CrunkLord420 s take on this.
I think this is an interesting question. What would be a good policy distinction here? I agree with the base argument for both sides, that is, "I should be able to modify any firmware on devices I own/firmware should be FOSS" and "data burned into a ROM chip is hardware or close enough".To continue the trend of kvetching about dumb hair-splitting retards, I was not aware that Phoronix had such deranged commenters. Case in point: their article about the newest release of Libreboot (archive). The OP is what you'd expect, but the comments are pretty entertaining, to say the least. They fail to ever get a proper conversation off the ground because an FSF dickrider immediately starts arguing with a muh trannies guy, entirely missing the point of what should be modern discussion about Libreboot: not so much their decision to incorporate minimal instead of no proprietary blobs, but what the actual technical implications of that are. I hate that every core/libre/gnu/whatever-boot discussion boils down to hair-splitting about what blob goes where and dumb schoolyard drama. At this point any difference in the extent to which modern and old Libreboot neuter the ME's capability as a remote access / spyware tool is purely philosophical. There is no practical difference between the ME present on a T480 vs something like a T440p. But the hair splitting continues because people love to be retarded.
The dumb answer is "no ROM chips" but if some vendor just etched the firmware into the main chip for whatever device using EUV lithography it's effectively the same thing as putting firmware in ROM (and much more expensive). On the other side trying to make everything FOSS isn't really possible unless we just start shipping FPGAs (also much more expensive and with their own bring up firmware similar to the IME, naturally) to everyone and you download a
So what's the right answer? All hardware comes with a complete verilog implementation? A set of fuzzing rules to make sure the hardware (ROM firmware or not) isn't backdoored? Tell me your thoughts, chayt.
And on a completely separate topic: Pulseaudio (pottering ware, but has been beaten into working-ish) or Pipewire (replace everything because it's better:tm: just like gayland). I would particularly like @CrunkLord420 s take on this.

