im still dazzled by games actually running to be that mad.
90% open is fine for now, hopefully my next machine will have open firmware if that AMD open firmware thing goes well.
Context?
Debian uses its own version of the Linux kernel with proprietary parts removed; however, if you want to install it on a machine that does have hardware for which there are no free drivers (which is to say almost any machine out there in the market), you’ll have to install proprietary parts; in the last version, Debian 12, system does that by default.
Intel Management Engine is a CPU-level microprogram that runs with highest priority and does not have open code, so essentially every PC with Intel CPU runs some arbitrary code we cannot verify. Same for AMD Platform Security Processor by the way, so there is no simple escape.
Oh and BIOS is proprietary too, and only a few select machines can have a fully libre BIOS successfully installed on them.
Thereby even if you go to essentially libre version of Linux, there will, almost universally, be pieces of obfuscated code with no disclosure on what they’re doing there.
IME is even worse than that. It runs on a supervisor processor in the chipset that has privileged access to the memory, peripherals, and CPU, and can run when the rest of the system is powered off. IME is how Intel AMT can serve as a KVM-over-IP, and just because you don’t have a CPU with Vpro doesn’t mean all the components aren’t there for an exploited or backdoored ME firmware to remotely log your console or inject keystrokes.
Apparently it can also read any decryption keys read by the cpu.
Thanks for adding up!
Didn’t knew about the Debian part I thought they said that they will ship an installer with non-free by default and another installer which you can configure.
Btw I’m on my way to build a new x220 with libreboot and GUIX can we get more free than that? Xd
Isn’t that a hardware problem though? At some point you want your software to work, and years of reverse engineering for it to do so is a long time for it isn’t it?
Well, it’s obviously dictated by hardware and the software that manufacturers release for it. I’m not calling enthusiasts to reverse engineer every single driver, that’s impossible.
The point is, there is a lot of proprietary blobs in everyone’s systems, and it’s not cool. If you ask me, we should obviously shift policies to force manufacturers to open source drivers and management systems.
Is there a completely libre platform out there. I don’t have any problem with running a risv-v CPU or anything similar
Why would you panic more from #3 than #1?
Backdoors in the CPU microcode, backdoors in the proprietary firmware of your motherboard / hard drives, backdoor through Intel Management Engine / AMD PSP. They’re all hardware level backdoors that can’t easily be disabled / replaced on newer systems.
There are only a select few of systems out their that can run a fully free BIOS with no IME, but those systems are about 15+ years old. In terms of freedom, we’re fucked. Even if you do switch to GNU/Linux, you’re still not entirely free.
i am confused
Answered to another comment. In short: it’s very hard to make your PC run fully libre software, and no consumer-grade solution can do that.
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I was never a fan of SystemD for that reason. As much as I’m a Windows person, I always admired Linux for its simplicity of “everything is a file”, “keep things in text where possible” and “a program does one thing and one thing only”, and between the binary logs and monolithic chunks it just threw that out the window.
Framework will save us!
