:: [DNG] The Blackbird - An owner cont…
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Skribent: Taiidan@gmx.com
Dato:  
Til: dng
Emne: [DNG] The Blackbird - An owner controlled, open source firmware system on the POWER ppc64/ppc64le arch - a less expensive mATX TALOS 2
This is a much less expensive mATX variant of the TALOS 2 from the same
people.

It runs both little and big endian so both ppc64 and ppc64le and
supports POWER-KVM/POWER-IOMMU/IOMMU-GFX for DMA protection and to
attach PCI-e devices to VM's including PCI-e graphics devices[3]

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blackbird-POWER9-Pre-Orders
https://raptorcs.com/content/BK1B01/intro.html
https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Blackbird

The only binary blob is the onboard NIC firmware[1], otherwise it is
fully open source, has a variety of end-user available documentation[4]
and has no hardware code signing enforcement so it is entirely yours to
own unlike modern x86 stuff which can't ever be free[2] and has the
impossible to disable ME/PSP doing god knows what.

OpenPOWER9 CPU's are Made in USA and the board is Made in the USA from
US and (probably) foreign components so it is much more trustworthy.

In terms of speed POWER9 is superior to the offerings from intel/amd or
equivilant when compared without x86's spectre/meltdown protections
enabled as intel most of the time disables them with their public CPU
benchmarks.

[1]The Broadcom NIC was the best alternative to using an intel nic as
there is a large amount of documentation available, people are working
on freeing it and the first one to do so gets a free TALOS 2 workstation
worth 5K. Intel is considered a competitor so buying their networking
ASIC's supports them and thus further anti-feature development - there
is also the possibility of undocumented dangerous ME style features in
the silicon mask rom.

[2]New x86 hardware has none of the documentation published that is
required to write firmware and it has a variety of black boxes like
ME/PSP, boot guard etc designed to prevent you from owning and
controlling your hardware.

[3]They recommend the using the Radeon Pro WX31xx/41xx/51xx/71xx
graphics cards series as they work the best with POWER - nvidia hates
linux and tries time and again to break IOMMU-GFX on geforce cards
requiring work arounds.

[4]IBM provides to the public all the documents one would need to make
their own POWER firmware and do various other things - more
documentation is available for OpenPOWER members or by request.

It really blows my mind that IBM of all companies is the one to save
computing freedom - POWER is now the only owner controlled high
performance CPU arch.