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Comment by throwaway7767 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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