Do ARM chips have ME or PSP equivalents? It would be great to be able to buy a new machine and use something like coreboot without having to use hacks to disable ME.

Every moderately complex SoC will have something like ME or PSP. The most recent big boy ARM SoC that I can think of without something like that was the iMX6. Even SiFive's newer U54-MC RISC-V SoC has a little "monitor core".

SoC power management, system bringup, and maintenance tasks are complicated enough these days to warrant a full small core tacked onto the side. These cores are necessary, and aren't going away. Complaining about them being there is just pissing into the wind. Complain about what they're used for and the closed source nature of their code.

craftyguy

They aren't 'necessary'. You can completely disable the ME and have a usable system. Maybe you are confusing it with the PCH?

monocasa

Check out what the ME disable stuff does. It just removes some of the binaries from the thing's uKernel that are the non boot services. The ME is required for system bringup.

> However, while Intel ME can't be turned off completely, it is still possible to modify its firmware up to a point where Intel ME is active only during the boot process, effectively disabling it during the normal operation, which is what me_cleaner tries to accomplish.

https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner

EDIT: Also, the ME is inside the PCH, so I'm not really sure why you're making a distinction there.