Re:Hacking BIOS chips isn't just the NSA's domain anymore
by indians_pro on Saturday March 21, 2015 @11:42AM
(#9243029)
Assume for a moment that the 3D printer for logic gates is a little too much of a long-shot. So if somehow the funds for a large-scale investment into 'open' RISC-V processors are obtained, it is theoretically possible for a community of hackers to write their own BIOS'es on a these processors? And then eventually the whole stack going up to userspace applications. So the only problem right now is that of funds? What other obstructions will be there to build a completely libre system from the ground up?
EDIT : Also, HomeCMOS doesn't look active as of June 2013.
Re:Hacking BIOS chips isn't just the NSA's domain anymore
by pgeorgi on Saturday March 21, 2015 @11:50AM
(#9243050)
coreboot works on emulation/qemu-riscv, and the communities have somer (small) overlap. We (at coreboot) intend to support coreboot on real RISC-V hardware as soon as possible.
For the higher software stack, Linux on RISC-V already exists, and from there it's open source, a compiler plus some portability work to get a useful stack.
But that's only the CPU side. Good enough for embedded applications and maybe even servers - but at some point, data has to hit a display. http://www.miaowgpu.org/ or something like that could help there, but I know next to nothing about it.
Once you can do your own processors, the architecture is alright. To avoid running into licensing issues all the time, projects like RISC-V (http://riscv.org/) can help - or open cores like Leon (SPARCv8), OpenSPARC-T1/2 (SPARCv9), openRISC and several more.
The problem is, the silicon processes were optimized for investment heavy, large scale operations. To ensure the livelihood of general purpose computing we need a "3D printer for logic gates" (for lack of better term), even if it's economically and technologically less efficient (but not too much, obviously).