I am Jeremy Soller, Principal Engineer at System76.

Let me know if you have any questions. The source for this can be found here:

https://github.com/system76/firmware-open

There are instructions there for building and testing the firmware in QEMU, you do not need to have our hardware to try it out.

Just wanted to give you some love. It must be really harsh for morale dealing with the OSS crowd who will always consider you don't do enough without recognizing that you are helping building a road where none existed before.

Kudos to you!

Honest question: why do you consider System76 to be building new roads by using locked hardware and offering partial open source firmware for it? Wouldn't the new roads kudos be more appropriately given to all of the folks that made real open hardware happen (RISC-V, OpenPOWER, etc.) years before this partly-open-source system announcement went out?

In my mind the RISC-V folks especially were real trailblazers in this space -- they took massive risks when no one, and I mean no one, was doing open source CPUs beyond soft cores. IBM focused more on open firmware, then eventually opened their ISA, but x86 vendors have had no such forward vision in their history -- the x86 vendors have followed in this space, not led, for well over a decade, and indeed both sides of the x86 duopoly (Intel and AMD) are both separately on record as having stated their goal is to take control away from the machine owner in whatever manner they need to in order to fulfill their DRM contracts.

Even with this laptop announcement, if I'm honest, more following is being demonstrated -- the coreboot user community had open source firmware ARM laptops (Chromebooks) available quite a long time ago, why weren't those hailed as building new roads when they appeared? Does anyone really think we would have reached a point where an x86 vendor would be trying to advertise even partly open source firmware without the pioneering efforts of the competing, truly open architectures?

To the downvoters: I'm guessing you wanted to run Windows 10 "safely" somehow, or sandbox your games. There's almost no other reason to be this stuck on x86; at the end of the day it's just a consumer architecture that some well known privacy disrespecting software requires to run. It's not even that great of an architecture from a technical perspective, it just happens to have the financial weight of the prosumer market behind it right now.

Here's reality:

This laptop won't stop Windows exfiltrating your data. These x86 systems are leaky, they require sizeable amounts of low level binary firmware to even boot, and proper isolation is near impossible. Try sticking a PCIe diagnostic system on an open PCIe slot and sending commands to the WiFi or Ethernet card -- most likely it'll respond [1]. Then consider the firmware in the various controllers attached to the PCIe bus, including your GPU.

It's probably a violation of your game's anticheat system to try to sandbox it. It's definitely a violation of the NVIDIA driver EULA to run it in a virtual machine, unless you pay the enterprise driver license fees and use a server grade adapter. The kind of adapter you won't usually find in a laptop, by the way.

This is a topic that I find very frustrating. We all know you want to do the above. It can't be done without license violations all over the place, or head-in-sand make-believe "security", on modern x86 hardware. No wishing, hoping, etc. will make this change.

[1] Yes, this is known to happen on specific x86 systems that I have personally tried (in that case, it was a malfunctioning GPU writing to the disk controller!). Invalid cross-device access was also tried on a POWER box, where the invalid accesses were blocked and logged as intended.

Let me take this opportunity to ask you a question here after you making clear the problems you see.

Hardware becomes more complex and can include internal software that from a user perspective is just part of the hardware. But in fact, it is software running doing complex things outside of the oversight and control of the user.

Do you have plans to not just have open software but also open hardware? Do you hope to offer a device in the future with not just free software, but with the source files of the integrating hardware like the motherboard as well as of the chips like CPU and auxiliary ICs? Do you see a possibility to start with an open RSIC-V CPU?

Actually, yes! We're closely monitoring the development progress of the open toolchains for various FPGAs; with POWER ISA now being open for implementation by anyone anywhere, I could easily see a future where extremely sensitive work is seamlessly moved from a large closed ASIC like the current IBM POWER chips to a completely software compatible, but significantly slower, soft SoC running in an FPGA. Or even an ASIC, if methods are eventually developed to verify the ASICs match the input design files at scale (i.e. non-destructive testing).

This seamless transition is one of the key benefits of an open ISA in my mind; development and testing of algorithms can be handled on the closed but top of the line (i.e. extremely powerful) ASIC, then when sensitive data is being handled that same binary can literally be run without changes on the soft core or other slower, but open, system. You could even compile on the slower ultra-trusted system, and test the binary on the larger ASIC -- lots of interesting possibilities here!

That is exciting! Open and well-documented FPGAs are definitely useful and very interesting to have in a device. Have you looked into OpenPiton [0], PULP [1], BOOM [2], or lowRISC [3]? While I'm hopeful that you find these projects personally interesting, I'm also looking forward to eventually see them in devices. Sorry for not listing any open POWER CPU/SoC projects as I'm not aware of any. Please share if you know any.

[0] https://github.com/PrincetonUniversity/openpiton [1] https://github.com/pulp-platform [2] https://github.com/riscv-boom/riscv-boom [3] https://www.lowrisc.org/

https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt

It's also structured very well, quite clean for learning purposes etc. The current goal so far as I know is to perfect this core, and fork for a more complex / powerful variant. Maybe by the time that's done, the open FPGA tooling will have caught up enough to be able to run a usefully fast (~200MHz) POWER soft core, all in FPGA logic...

I'd strongly prefer a ppc64 core over a RISC-V core for one simple reason: we have a wide deployed base of very powerful ppc64 machines, and not having to keep cross compilers and related environments around is a massive streamlining step that we don't even know the full effects of yet (it hasn't been legal until now to have the SoC under development running the same architecture as the high end workstations and servers used to develop [for] it). The demo of using mainline GCC on a POWER box to build a binary for the Microwatt (that would also run on the host with KVM, if desired, for fast trace and debug) was most impressive.