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Great! Small point though, i would be in favour of a separate Bluetooth and Wifi kill switch.

EDIT: They use i5 and i7 processors, which IIRC use black-box Intel microcode... Also, i wonder if they support Libreboot? My apologies if it turns out i cannot read. Otherwise they look quite nice. I'm excited to see more "alternatives" in the "free as in liberty" laptop space.

EDIT 2: Some more information here: https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-13

EDIT 3: At least they're up-front about what's Free and what's not: https://puri.sm/posts/purism-software-freedom-deconstructed/

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> i would be in favour of a separate Bluetooth and Wifi kill switch.

that's what I thought as well.

About the microcode, this won't be fixed. But see the weekly updates on their blog[1] that states progress they make with the coreboot developers. Hopefully they can free the number one problem with intel chips[2] which is the Management Engine firmware.

[1] https://puri.sm/posts/weekly-update-on-librem-production-201...

[2] http://www.coreboot.org/Binary_situation

Assuming they're running Intel Wireless chips (which is very likely), this is impossible because they are run on the same antennas by the same chip.

You can disable this in software by passing "bt_coex_active=N" to the iwlwifi kernel module, but of course, who knows if that's actually sufficient.

I'm pretty sure the situation with other vendors is similar or worse. Big vendors like Broadcom have terrible open source track records.

I think he means two switches, one for camera and microphone and one for blutooth and wifi; not a separate wifi switch and a bluetooth switch. Of course, a little DIP panel with a toggle for each device would be nice, too!

They definitely do not use Intel Wireless chips.

In reply to sibling poster about dip switches, it looks like there are little wires running inside the case from the four separate connections to the two DPDT switches, i.e., if you want to find a DIP switch and mount it to your laptop, the 4 wires are easily hackable.

> EDIT: They use i5 and i7 processors, which IIRC use black-box Intel microcode... Also, i wonder if they support Libreboot? My apologies if it turns out i cannot read. Otherwise they look quite nice. I'm excited to see more "alternatives" in the "free as in liberty" laptop space.

They are going to use coreboot, which is free but includes some binary blobs from Intel. I don't think you can boot any modern x86 without a binary blob from the CPU manufacturer, unfortunately.

I also don't think it's possible to get any modern machine up without some device firmware blobs. The best-case is that all the blobs are provided onboard so the OS doesn't need to provide them, but they're still there and we have to trust them.

Purism seems to me an incremental improvement and I might buy one, but I really hope for a truly free machine someday.

AFAIK the microcode updates aren't mandatory, you can use your computer without them and use the stock microcode (though that's also proprietary).

> AFAIK the microcode updates aren't mandatory, you can use your computer without them and use the stock microcode (though that's also proprietary).

Microcode is only one part of it. I was thinking of the ME firmware, and to a lesser extent the FSP. It's not possible to boot a modern Intel processor without ME. The ME has direct DMA access to all peripherals and can use the network interfaces directly, behind the operating systems back.

I believe AMD has similar things. They are all signed by the manufacturer and the hardware will refuse to load a replacement even if it existed.

Puri.sm has been saying for weeks they are going to have a big announcement about the ME "next week". I do wish their process was a bit more open, but I'm hoping they've actually found a way to make the machine boot without an ME. That in and of itself would be a huge step forward for libreboot/coreboot.

depends on the type of issue these updates fix. Some Via Nano CPUs came with microcode that hung the CPU on power state transitions.

If you don't intend to run the CPU at 100% all the time, you want to install those updates.

Similar issues (usually more subtle) exist for other CPUs

Which is why I feel that skipping the microcode updates is entirely useless.

They can but nobody will put in the work or money:

http://www.gaisler.com/index.php/products/ipcores/soclibrary

You get an open ISA w/ Open Firmware w/ open HW implementation under GPL that you can fab wherever, including MPW runs that cut costs. Or you can just buy the one's he sells which go up to 4 cores now. Developers porting browsers, flash, servers, whatever can use regular development boards to get most of it done. Gaisler and SPARC have been best option to jump-start open HW/SW movement for a long time. Just not utilized.

A Transmeta approach could be used with underlying RISC core for x86 emulation. Wouldn't be core i7 speed or anything but it could be acceptable. China's MIPS-based Loongson does this.

I don't really feel like the librem laptops offer much value when built using a processor with IME. It's offering a mostly open source laptop, but still has a massive gaping backdoor for someone to log your every keystroke and get every bit of your data - even if the laptop is off or your harddrive is encrypted (source: http://libreboot.org/faq/#intel)

I am more excited in the continued development of the Novena laptop (https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena) but it's a shame there aren't any suitable modern processors to use in it.

Yeah, the discussions get funnier when you see people speculating about Intel backdoors and ask yourself "Did everyone forget about Intel AMT?" Whether it's on or not, the functionality is probably in every chip in the family and maybe others to cut NRE costs.

Most open, security-focused laptop with the most closed, backdoored processor. It's funny shit.

Freescale's ARM processors are quite open, and getting better all the time! I'm looking forwards to their i.MX7 line.

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