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MrReplikant

Member

Registered: 2022-12-03

Posts: 53  

Re: Brave New Trusted Boot World

since Power ISA got open-sourced, there's an initiative to bring that back

Unfortunately POWER10 brought in a requirement for non-free firmware in the memory controller chips:

https://www.devever.net/~hl/omi

Not that it really matters because any POWER9 machine (or any of the "open" platforms you list) will need a hard drive and that drive will have a controller running proprietary code below ring 0. The battle is already lost.

the recent release of the Alibaba Roma RISC-V laptop

RISC-V is nice but the specification does allow for non-free extensions and I'm sure most, if not all, manufacturers will take advantage of that. To presume otherwise is naive.

My conclusion is, if we can work to keep our old (or simply pre-lockdown) hardware working long enough, say maybe another 10 years (depending on the device), we can wait this out long enough for those devices to become a bit more accessible to the common folk.

It seems to be getting worse rather than better but whatever.

I am not saying any of those options are perfect, and notice that I never claimed such. But what we are left with is either that, or hardware that is fully locked-in and monopolized. Which would you prefer? All I'm saying is that in time, *hopefully*, these devices will become less expensive/more accessible.

In the meantime, to stave this issue off, we need to look at how to make Devuan more efficient and/or find more workable alternatives to programs that are becoming increasingly bloated.

Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe it's futile. But i'll die screaming and go down fighting before I let Apple or Microsoft claim victory over us or the Linux Community. After all, isn't that stubbornness what got us this far in the first place, in a way?

Last edited by MrReplikant (2022-12-17 16:37:52)

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That's all, folks.