This general is dedicated to the creation of a list of hardware that is relatively botnet-free. The Intel ME and other components are a serious threat to user privacy.
>"b-but how can I avoid this? Im scared, user!" That's the point of this thread. To highlight options that are out there that are relatively free of botnets. This will include the typical Librebooted memepads and whatnot, but a big part of this is also exploring alternative architectures.
(2/4) For inclusion into this list, if the processor is made by Intel Corporation or Advanced Micro Devices, the device must be 100% free as in Libreboot. Otherwise, a less-extreme stance is taken, and something like Coreboot or U-boot will suffice.
(3/4) In general, your biggest concern with ARM is the GPU drivers. Mali is fucked. PowerVR too. Vivante GC and Qualcomm Ardreno are fine. Broadcom VideoCore is partial. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_graphics_device_driver#ARM MALI MIGHT BE GETTING OPENED UP PRAISE LINUX TORVALDS TECH TIPS lwn.net/Articles/738225/ Some anons have reported that lighter environments like XFCE are usable on stuff like Mali without the driver, but it's not ideal. One user said he couldn't remove the ChromeOS on his libreboot C201. This github issue talks about a solution. github.com/altreact/archbk/issues/3
OpenPOWER (Supported Distros: Fedora, Debian, CentOS/RHEL, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, BSDs): Raptor Engineering sells POWER9 workstations, that may soon be getting RYF certification. They're expensive as fuck, but probably the most powerful non-botnet computers that exist. Comparable to Xeons/Epyc. raptorcs.com/TALOSII/
SPARC (Supported Distros: *BSD, Gentoo, Illumos): Legit server stuff here. Open ISA and Open Boot firmware. code.coreboot.org/p/openboot/source/tree/1/ Below link is a big list of options, from ancient 80s shit, to modern servers released this year with 5.0GHz and 32 cores And of course, everything in between en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC#Implementations
Removal? not really. There have been some recent """""removals""""" involving a HAP bit thing that supposedly disables it on skylake, and Intel apparently done something, but from a lot of conversation I've seen both in these threads and in other threads, these fixes are likely placebo. They're half-fixes at best.
Isaiah Turner
I own a computer with a PPC processor. Feels good to have no backdoors installed.
Jack Smith
PowerMac?
Dominic Edwards
Please tell me X220 Libreboot is gonna happen.
Gavin Sullivan
Some user in an older thread says they're still working on it. I personally don't think it'll happen by their initial deadline, as they planned to have it figured out by the end of this month.
Blake Hill
I need an SBC with gigabit ethernet and h265 video. If possible usb 3.0 or 2Gb ethernet.
Either ARM or whatever but I want it for a botnet free low power consumption server that'll be running 24/7.
Julian Walker
I hope they will, it would be awesome. I don't even know what alternatives are for thinkpads right now.
Jason Cook
AMD is allowing it to be disabled with the latest agesa.
Henry White
They didn't open-source anything. We don't know if it does anything.
>Presses button >"Whew! I'm so glad I'm free from the botnet! >Button did nothing >CIAniggers laugh
Mason Howard
isnt it possible to use the nsa flag thing to disable the management engine?
Aiden Scott
No.
As mentioned above, it's a half-fix at best.
Grayson Reed
Anyone have any more suggestions for devices to add?
Noah Baker
>the AGESA+PSP+UEFI source will never be open
Carson Bailey
I really hope RISC-V takes off and gets supported by major manufacturers and software developers. It would be interesting to see how a highly optimized RISC chip that has implemented all the lessons learned over the last couple of decades would square off against x86 for general computing. It seems that RISC stopped making sense when we could just shirk the lithography and bump up the clocks. Now that we have hit a wall for both of those it seems like it would make sense to pursue a RISC approach.
Elijah Richardson
It's still got a long way to go, but that LowRISC thing looks promising. From what I can tell, the clockspeeds will be comparable to a Raspberry Pi, so I'm thinking it will at first be competing in the SBC market. Eventually I hope higher-performance stuff gets made with it.
David Wood
Yep. as mentioned in the first post, Libreboot, Plebbit, and Edward motherfucking Snowden asked for this to be opened up, but AMD still said no in the end. Hopefully they'll have a change of heart, but if we're going by the fucko conspiracy theory angle, they would never do that because of pressure from the three-letter organizations.
Christopher Foster
but those damn opcodes it hurts
Samuel Bell
Mind explaining?
Liam Watson
>It was said that everybody within ARM is in favor of solving the problem by open-sourcing ARM's driver — except for one recalcitrant high-level manager. REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Logan Thompson
Rapid question: are C2Q affected by Intel ME?
Jackson Roberts
Shame they don't tell us who this guy is. Any way we could find out?
Matthew Phillips
risc-v opcodes are seven bits, but if any of the first 2 bits are set, the opcode is compressed. so effectively you get 33(may be 32) + 3(compressed) opcodes, this wouldn't bug me as much if one of the main design docs didn't complain about MIPS lack of opcode space(though that happened for a bunch of other reasons)
Luis Powell
Last time I checked Libreboot's notabug, I saw something about them talking about providing libreboot support/instructions for C2Q stuff (On T500/W500 specifically)
Adrian Bell
Probably not, hopefully he's close to retiring or switching companies
Landon Wood
yes every cpu after core2duo has one
Levi Bennett
The yuq mali driver continues to see progress with the mali-450 gpus now supported, no idea if it will ever get to the point of usability to be included with mainline mesa like vivante and adreno drivers
There's currently no driver for the modern opencl and vulkan supporting mali midgard or bifrost architectures.
Noah Morales
Close to be beaten the fuck up in some dark alley.
Benjamin Martinez
This Who is he?
Anthony Baker
48core Cavium desktops WHEN?
Chase Davis
That would be fucking incredible. I'm still waiting for another email from PogoLinux guy on the status of their firmware for their ARM rackmounts. They use dual-caviums for total of 96 cores
Blake Powell
bump
Eli Carter
>hormone replacement thread
mips is celeron performance arm is shit sparc only has 1 (one) floating point unit powerpc is old and dying openpower is expensive as fuck
well you sure showed THEM
Jackson Ortiz
>AMD gives options to disable psp
why are you still using intel, jamal?
Brayden Green
when did that become a thing?
David Murphy
Loonix, even in its heaviest DEs, is lighter than Windows One of those MIPS devices is meant for use as a NAS Give one good reason why ARM is shit. Remember that there are chromebooks with 2.0GHz processors, and potentially 48-core server chips of that architecture. Interesting on SPARC. Do you have evidence of this drastically affecting real-world usage, or is this just theoretical? I answered someone in the last thread, but how is powerpc old if there's a company still making it? Remember that old powerbooks/powermacs are not the only computers of that architecture. Openpower is indeed very expensive, but so are Xeon/Epyc server systems, which is what POWER9 is in direct competition with.
I don't even know why I bother responding to bait.
Asher Johnson
See:
Jacob Butler
>I don't even know why I bother responding to bait. education purpose, user
Adam Anderson
That makes sense. Here's a trap
got any devices that might be worth adding to the list?
Austin Harris
>OP is living in a fantasy world. It's over sunshine. BotNet is here to stay. The lion will not lay down with the lamb.
Ethan Lopez
>lions and lambs and shit wat?
Jeremiah Allen
>Here's a trap pic related :^) >got any devices that might be worth adding to the list? Maybe libre NAS solutions? I'm thinking about it for a time. And for now I think that best option is go for librebooted Intel D945GCLF + LSI RAID 8704EM2. Though I need dig into configuring this.
I already have the GnuBee, but I've never seen the Helios4 before. Seems to use U-Boot, suprisingly decent performance (higher than the average soc), and open hardware. I'm gonna add it. Thanks!
Chase Hernandez
The only thing that concerns me about it, is this case from PMMA which can easily store static charge.
Jackson Gutierrez
The only thing you need secure comms for is comms, so performance isn't particularly important. Use a fast gaymertoi for kiddyshit and if it gets pwned there won't be anything on it that matters.
You need a benign metadata profile anyway to avoid interesting slaughterbot swarms.
A separate, preferably tiny, machine for financial transactions etc would be fine. Anyone ITT probably has a pile of PCs and one more won't matter.
A "secure computing stick" would avoid all the external garbage and allow peripheral choice.
Juan Bailey
Does ARM not realize that the longer they avoid opening their drivers, the more market share they will ultimately lose? The market is crying out for a alternative to x86. ARM is throwing away the opportunity to be that alternative.
Nathaniel Baker
Didn't they make you learn the Bible in school? Disgraceful.
Mason White
I hope you are not him: There's no place for nihilism among godly man.
Existing isn't illegal, so clearly you're up to something
Michael Powell
Indeed
Jackson Lopez
...
Anthony Stewart
...
Logan Myers
I imagine it takes more than a different BIOS to stop agencies. Liberoot just helps lessen one point of attack but plenty still remain, especially attacks based off internet activities rather than just hardware.
Alexander Price
oh most certainly but this thread is about the hardware. hence the name.
Tyler Bennett
Also, not saying that you're making this argument, but I hate dismissive, defeatist attitudes when it comes to this. I've seen it a lot with the Librem Phone. People saying shit along the lines of "lel it's a scam, guys! baseband exists!" Like yeah, no shit. There's no getting around that though, and the phone is 10 times better than your average shit when it comes to security/privacy. It's the whole "This thing right here is not absolutely 100% perfect, so let's disregard it entirely, and give in to the botnet!" You might as well say "Encryption algorithms can technically be broken. Let's stop using encryption"
Oliver Flores
again, not saying that to you. just ranting.
this thread got really philosophical and shit all of a sudden
wew
Gavin Rodriguez
what platform can I use to privately mine monero and zcoin?
Isaiah Moore
Not him. I know what you mean, but I like it. These days I feel like the though police has visited Sup Forums and we no longer discuss important things by some obvious troll spouting fallacies and advocating nihilism.
Adam Bennett
I know jack shit about mining, but I hear it's GPU dependent, and not so much CPU dependent. So anything you can get a sweet GPU on I guess.
Gabriel Clark
I'm not quite sure if I understand your english, but I think I agree. There do appear to be a lot of shills/nihilists/jews/trolls on Sup Forums lately.
Isaiah Johnson
bump
Sebastian Rodriguez
Meanwhile at Intel...
Jonathan Ward
kek
Camden Davis
all core2duos?
Michael Morgan
bump
Elijah Phillips
>I know jack shit about mining, but I hear it's GPU dependent, and not so much CPU dependent. All you neee to know is GPUs are much better for parallelization than CPUs because they have thousands of cores and mining algorithms are parallelizable.
Grayson Fisher
Yeah pretty much. I think they might be supporting Core2Quad on the T500/W500 too.
As for anything newer, they had a thing a while ago where you could pre-order an x220 (Which is Sandybridge), and they'd ship it by the end of this december once they figured out how to libreboot it. Doesn't look like that's gonna happen in time, but they did have the page up, and one user claims they're still working on it.
Landon Adams
Also, if you go AMD, the newest you can get is a bit later, with the D16 server/workstation board with 2 Opterons
Ryan Kelly
What about olimex's arm laptop? It's weak but not botnet
Zachary Rivera
is it possible to get 4 or 8gb ram instead of 2?
Colton Gomez
That's just an uninterruptable power supply, user
Luke Ward
AllWinner had a kernel backdoor, but I assume they removed it by now.
Yeah they have to have removed that by now. Otherwise EOMA68 is gonna have some explaining to do (they use an allwinner)
I used to have Olimex in there, but I don't think we ever confirmed its boot firmware. I believe I added it because some user in one of the earliest threads wouldn't shut up about it, but if it uses U-Boot or whatever, I re-add it.
Jace Bailey
The next generation of the DragonBoard is coming out, the 820c
>The following high level features are functional: >* Support for all ARM CPU cores (2x Gold + 2x Silver) >* A5xx GPU support using Mesa/freedreno (mesa 17.1 at least is required, 17.2 is recommended) >* HDMI display (4K) >* USB3.0, on board UFS storage >* on board 1Gb Ethernet (PCIe) and WLAN/ath10k (PCIe) , both using upstream drivers >* Low speed I/O on the 96boards expansion header >* H/w video codecs, including 4K codecs (support for Gstreamer and ffmpeg frameworks)
Probably the closest thing to open source you are going to get. The Adreno GPU is much better than the standard ARM GPU and it's more open.
Lincoln Moore
Thanks for keeping this thread going, user. So is RISC-V the most open source option out of all of these? What's the most powerful?
Jack Fisher
...
Ryan Reyes
>snapdragon 845 is already released Why can't they make an updated model?
Kayden Fisher
>Core2Duo
The Intel Xeon E5450 (socket 771; modifiable to socket 775) can fit in the librebooted GA-G41M-ES2L. The thing is, will it work with the Xeon?
The latest high end qualcomm SoC doesn't seem to be a botnet
>The SPU’s completely isolated from the system, according to Qualcomm. It’s not a “system master,” meaning it can’t access information from other systems or take control of new processes, but it’s able to access information from other systems independently.
Cooper Brown
Cant be sure if its not open source.
Cameron Martinez
OP here >RISC-V the most open source option out of all of these? Most certainly, and because of that, I think it has a bright future. It just needs more time to develop and grow. as mentioned previously, the LowRISC I think has similar clockspeed to an RPi, so it will at first be competing in that market. I hope some people end up making something more high-end with it though. That would be amazing.
As for what's most powerful, that would probably be the TALOS II. Technically modern SPARC hardware would probably be up there, with 5.0 GHz clockspeeds and 32 cores, but those are server systems that would be purchased as part of a business transaction. Not exactly something you could just buy like the TALOS afaik.
Is the boot firmware open (U-boot or similar)?
I've heard a lot of anons bring that up. I don't know anything about that sort of mod. Maybe someone with a bit more knowledge could bring this up with the Libreboot folks? I've mentioned a couple times that they're gonna be supporting a Core2Quad mod for certain Libreboot Thinkpads.
Ryan Nguyen
Also, you're welcome. I don't know how I came up with the idea to start this project, but I'm glad I did.
James Rodriguez
I tried to buy an orange pi from aliexpress to help with mali driver development. I don't have a credit card so I couldn't pay. I don't want to spend 40€ on amazon some shitty 15€ SBC that is probably going to collect dust because I don't have a lot of time to spend on developing the driver anyway.
Jackson Morgan
It's all good. The official one is getting opened up as soon as the management faggot changes his mind/retires/gets fired/dies/etc.
