FRfrabre·Feb 9, 2024
I care! And I know a lot of people who care, but we are still a niche sized group. I care mainly because of Raptor Computing Systems offerings, which I think are the main (only?) OpenPOWER systems available. I use a Blackbird, and I'm happy with it.
From my own point of view, I'm willing to spend a $$$$ premium on hardware where I can have assurances that from the time I boot it, only code I authorize to run is run. Where every part of the system has code that, at least in principle, I or someone else could audit and fix. People have valuable IP stored on computers and it's worth much more than a few thousand dollars.
If you just look at price to performance, you are missing the point. Also, the price is not out of line with other niche desktops such as Apple's or System76.
There's not a lot of competition in this niche. The prev
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ious system that was useful was a ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboard, which could be librebooted (https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/kgpe-d16.html) I expect something new to come along in this space every 5-10 years.
For my purposes, I haven't fought with the software ecosystem, and was able to compile the very few packages that weren't already precompiled.
Here are some developments I think are worth noting:
* There is a libre driver for the onboard NIC. (https://github.com/meklort/bcm5719-fw) This seems to be the only project that cares about blobs in every part of the board.
* Dasharo https://www.dasharo.com/ providing alternative boot firmware.
* Artic Tern, (https://www.raptorcs.com/content/AT1PC2/intro.html) which is objectively still mostly a development platform (that if you're skilled you can get to work) provides a completely libre boot environment and the possibility of controlling other peripherals using only auditable code.
A few things have not yet made it onto the board:
* Flexver (https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/documentation/flexve...) which would allow for verifying and auditing hardware, firmware and the boot process isn't commercially available yet.
* Ultravisor state enabling more secure VMs is still awaiting implementation AFAIK. (https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Power_ISA/Privilege_States#Ul...)
* I'm not aware of a lot of hardware that would take advantage of IBM CAPI 2.0 IO accelleration. Perhaps someone has some information on this.
* I'm not sure what the status of transactional memory is, but I'm not aware of it being used in software. Perhaps someone can enlighten me on this.
These would be nice to have, and I hope to have them in the future.
The bottom line is that this is the only hardware currently in production that is going in the direction promised by the personal computing revolution back in the 1970s and 80s and is still capable of handling most people's current general computing needs. I write this hoping that other people like me who are reading this understand the importance of keeping hardware like this alive.