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Comment by gioele | Hacker News Reader

Librem 13 and Librem 15v2 [1] are one blob away from being FSF-certifiable. And they are brand new hardware.

It isn't going to happen, at least not through the use of Libreboot [0], which is what the X200 in the parent article relies on for their firmware replacement. The X200 is one of the latest support ThinkPad models, as the newer ones also use Intel Management Extensions. Without replacing these binary blobs with free software you won't be able to get the FSF certification. [1] Or would it fall under the "secondary embedded processor" exception?

>Will the Purism Librem laptops be supported?

>Probably not. There are several privacy, security and freedom issues with these laptops, due to the Intel chipsets that they use. See #intel. There are signed proprietary blobs which cannot be replaced (e.g. Intel Management Engine and CPU microcode updates). It uses the proprietary Intel FSP blob for the entire hardware initialization, which Intel won't provide the source code for. The Video BIOS (initialization firmware for the graphics hardware) is also proprietary.

>It will likely take many years to replace even one of these blobs, let alone all of them. Some of them (ME firmware and microcode) can't even be replaced, which immediately disqualifies these laptops from being added to libreboot.

[0] http://libreboot.org/faq/#librem

[1] https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/criteria

Purism claims to have gotten access to intel CPUs specially fused to run unsigned Management Engine firmware, and it claims to have made progress on a minimal replacement for the ME firmware.

The plan for the microcode is to just not ship any updates, either in the bios or the default distro.

The other parts will indeed take a lot more time, but it isn't hopeless.

https://puri.sm/posts/pioneering-cpu-efforts-to-liberate-lap...

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

Wow, I wonder how they pulled that off. It's certainly a good start, but since it will be shipping with non-Free (though replaceable) BIOS binaries it would still fall short of the Respects Your Freedom hardware certification requirements. I did some digging since I have little knowledge of the Purism project. The Purism project offers an estimate of one year for replacing the non-Free blobs in the firmware. The Libreboot FAQ says that it could take years to replace the Intel FSP or Video BIOS, much less both. Given that a Coreboot developer has expressed doubts [0, 1] about the bold claims the Purism project has made in the past I'm inclined to take the word of the folks working on Libreboot. If by the time, if ever, a truly Libre product ships from Purism will it be any less dated than the X200 we have now?

[0] http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/08/09/the-truth-about-pu...

[1] http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/02/23/the-truth-about-pu...

> one blob away

I'll believe it when I'll see it. All we have is their word for it, and I really don't like the way they are promoting their product so far.

It will literally never happen. Intel would never give this up.

An i5 @ 2.2 GHz w/ 4 GB of RAM starting at $1649 or an i7 @ 3.0 GHz w/ 4 GB of RAM starting at $1849!? Wow, good luck selling those.

Yep.

I paid $170 (in UK money) for a 2.4GHz i5 520M X201 with 4Gb of RAM...

They are also expensive as all shit.

Maybe they can subsidize it a bit by adding a bunch of malware. Root kits, spyware and adware are popular choices.

They are selling you a standard laptop, with standard hardware, commercial bios and firmware for a huge premium on price.

The only difference is that it comes with Linux, but a Dell XPS Dev edition with Ubuntu for nearly half the price and you're set.

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