My argument is that those are non-issue in terms of hardware and software freedom as you can _make_ CPU and chips through using RISC-V or RISC/POWER9, MIPS architecture if you have the relevant infrastructure and knowledge for it or to outsource the production and implement your own Quality Assurance to mitigate the risk of supply chain attack
_or_You can use chips like rockchip, run an x-ray scan to see how it is wired together or if x-ray is not conclusive enough then put it on a CNC machine with a drill and remove layer by layer while making a high-definition picture of each layer cut to then construct a 3D representation of the construction to know _exactly_ how the chip works _and_ in terms of rockchip they provide all required tools to inspect the chip through software, their microcode and bootloader and maintain patches for linux to make sure it works.
In addition FPGAs are a thing and we have user-friendly and programmable chips like arduino released under GPLv3-compatible license including the hardware files so worst case scenario in majority of the cases is writting arduino code and using that until you can figure out better implementation.
So can anyone dispute that CPUs and chips are a hardware freedom issue and elaborate exactly why or can we all agree that those are not a problem to move forward?
On 1/27/22 09:33, Adrien Bourmault via libreplanet-discuss wrote:
Le 27 janvier 2022 05:13:09 GMT+01:00, Richard Stallman <r...@gnu.org> a écrit :[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] > https://www.wired.com/story/22-year-old-builds-chips-parents-garage/ He has made a chip with 1400 transistors. I think that making a processor capable of running GNU/Linux like the 15-year-old processor in my T400s will take at least another decade, and probably two or three. I'm sure people will get there someday. But RYF's policies should be designed for the next few years, not for long-term policies. We can't push long-term policies, we can only encourage them. -- Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org) Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org) Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org) _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discussHello to all. I add my little stone to this discussion to say first that I agree with Richard that today we cannot yet say no to non-free hardware as we do with software, and that we cannot push such pre-requisites into RYF. What I have to add is mostly on the subject of processors, since we are talking about someone who has designed his own CPU. Some of you know that I'm a student in France in a master's degree in processor architecture. My laboratory, the LIP6, has been trying for a few years to focus on VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) design methods to design free hardware. Thus, our university has created a complete VLSI chain as free software. It is called Coriolis and allows the design of an ASIC from its VHDL description to the drawing of the masks (see https://coriolis.lip6.fr) Moreover, to design elements more quickly, component libraries are needed (to avoid reinventing the wheel). Especially for analog circuits. Our laboratory has therefore created the OCEANE library (sorry link in French, nobody has translated it yet https://www-soc.lip6.fr/equipe-cian/logiciels/oceane/). Finally, so that the masks produced by these methods can be transformed into real hardware, we had to find a foundry that would give us its PDK (all the information to correctly size the masks and adapt them to specific technologies). Unfortunately most foundries keep these parameters a secret. But recently, SkyWater foundry released their PDK. It is a technology with a fine 130nm etch. It's not state of the art, but it's enough to do something useful. You can find it here: https://skywater-pdk.readthedocs.io/en/main/ Thanks to this, at LIP6 (which belongs to Sorbonne University) we are now able to implement processors respecting the ARM v2 specification freely. A work on RISC V is in progress this year. -- Adrien Bourmault Trésorier de l'Association Libre en Communs, Associate member, Free Software Foundation GPG: aad6b069819e6979 - Defend Richard M. Stallman ! <https://stallmansupport.org/>_______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
-- Jacob Hrbek
publickey - kreyren@rixotstudio.cz - 1677db82.asc
Description: application/pgp-keys
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss