OpenBSD explicitly supports Pine 64/64+ and even ships the firmware to boot it with the install media. ROCK64/ROCKPro64 are also supported, but it's necessary to separately install an UEFI capable U-Boot. [0]
Yes, unfortunately you're right in that there's lots of room for improvement. Nevertheless I'd call the rk3399 a decent SoC, but then for me the fact that it runs without proprietary firmware is certainly more important than pure performance. What I'd really like to have though, is more RAM - I run my desktop on the rk3399. And I already use the PinePhone as a daily driver although I see that it's not there for most of the people.
But maybe this could not only change at the big vendors' whim, but also if more people express their wish for systems that are less locked in by changing their priorities.
Haven't heard of levinboot yet, LGTM, thanks for the hint!
Where do you get your entropy from? Does levinboot provide some (enough?) to the kernel? Right now I delay booting via a sleep in the initramfs so that I have time to randomly press as many keys as possible to get crng initialized before cryptsetup is called. Configuring my U-Boot build to provide entropy to the kernel is still on my to do list, haven't looked into it yet and don't know whether it already does or not. At least last time I checked I observed that KASLR didn't work due to missing entropy (the artificial delay won't work here as KASLR happens way before calling init).
> Rockship (PinePhone) which is reversed engineered so only old SoC have support and it require massive effort from the community.
PinePhone has Allwinner A64. [0]
And Rockchip SoCs have a quite decent track record of not only supporting mainline linux but even running without proprietary firmware - as does their current top level SoC (RK3399, featured in Pine64's ROCKPro64).
I like to build things from source, but I'd also like to hear more details about the problems encountered.
The whole tiers thing is first of all a chicken and egg problem. Which probably could be solved faster by keeping Drew invested. I also constantly have to fiddle with rust's lack of support for T2 (armv7-linux-musleabihf in the past and aarch64-linux-musl now, having given up on the former) and I agree that this aspect sucks and hinders adoption. And furthermore it defies one of rust's main goals, security: With something like ME/PSP having unrestricted access to whatever they want, why bother that much about memory safety?
After digging through some resources on the web I now believe that this is indeed still true - at least I couldn't find anything to the contrary (apparently you have to provide the firmware blob outside of U-Boot, which then loads it at runtime). This probably means the Rockchip SoCs I was talking about don't use Synopsys IP for the DDR PHY (although they tend to use a lot of Synopsys IP for all kinds of other components).
I wonder how I could have missed that issue with the Librem 5 till now.
> If you are familiar with work done in the FOSS community to procure devices with fully open firmware, the name Synopsys may ring a bell here. Synopsys is a company which sells IP blocks[...]. One of their IP block products is a DDR4 memory controller and PHY solution, which appears popular and which is found in a number of SoCs. It is however a known fact that Synopsys's DDR4 PHY requires a Synopsys-issued firmware blob to operate; therefore, chips which use the Synopsys DDR4 PHY inevitably have firmware blobs in their boot path
> Probably the most notable SoC containing a Synopsys DDR4 memory controller and PHY is the NXP i.MX8M series, which was for example selected by Purism to form the heart of their Librem 5 phone.
Is this (still) true? I just tried to find any binary blobs in U-Boot source tree [0], but didn't find any.
At least for some Rockchip SoCs (RK3399), which I assume also use Synopsys IP DDR PHYs, I know that it's not necessary to provide anything else apart from upstream U-Boot and Arm Trusted Firmware (ATF) [1]. And AFAICT current mainline U-Boot can initialize NXP i.MX8M's DDR PHY, too.
Thank you for all your efforts. The way you appear to have handled google's unjustifiable action is really impressive. Clearly that's one of the main reasons to be optimistic that matrix has a bright future - if I was in charge it certainly wouldn't. Due to incidents like this I simply ditched google completely. (OK, to be honest I sometimes watch videos on yt but without having an account.)
As you said it depends on the context, I agree, but thus the chances someone's using a generic query to find vendor independent resources like blogs are not zero. With regard to the given example "nrf wifi", I'd prefer DDG's results as I usually know the manufacturer of the hardware I work with but often search for solutions to problems in context of that hardware.
Furthermore depending on familiarity with domain names it's possible to deduce the manufacturer's website from GP's 9th result on DDG.
It often doesn't even matter to click wrong boxes to a certain degree. Green or red points are usually accepted as traffic lights (often no need to click the whole traffic light) and anything white painted on a street is usually accepted as a crosswalk and so on. Skipping/verifying the second task without even bothering to look at it (i.e. immediately after clicking "next" on the first one) usually works well, too. The AI based on the ML at work here seems not to be very sophisticated.
Using the Tor Browser from torproject.org with the so called "safest" security settings (that I usually use) I am not unique (currently 1 in 15k browsers have the same fingerprint as mine - which is not exactly great but still better than unique). With "standard" security settings (I switch to those mainly for watching videos) I am unique among the tested 288,728 others (screen qualities and not using the recommended default language en stick out).
A study from the Policy Department for Economic, Scientific and Quality of Life Policies (EU Directorate-General for Internal Policies) suggests implementing a firewall akin to China's (Page 37, section 5.1 "European Cloud / European Internet").
https://www.politico.eu/article/the-scandal-hanging-over-urs...