Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyldfire | Hacker News Reader

Boy, it would be sweet if ARM or someone would sponsor some kind of common system architecture. Sure, lots of vendors would keep making their own boards like Pi, beagleboard, ODROID, etc. But having an extensible architecture like UEFI or similar to facilitate bootstrapping while still being open would be awesome.

View on HN

They already have done all that:

  hardware: https://www.96boards.org/
  boot: https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-trusted-firmware
  toolchain: http://releases.linaro.org/14.11/components/toolchain/binaries/

In particular, the ARM trusted firmware project is what is supposed to save us from todays proprietary boot madness

The word "trusted" with regard to firmware traditionally means "pwned by a hostile adversary"; did ARM just choose a bad name for their project or is this another bit of "you think it's your computer but you're wrong" bullshit?

The code is BSD licensed but TrustZone and probably this reference firmware for it are mostly about DRM.

Ah, ok, so it is all about the traditional, unintentionally ironic definition of "trusted", then.

The SPARC architecture is open and fully documented, the only licensing encumbrance is a token administration fee of approximately $100 that helps maintain the organisation that is the steward of the SPARC ISA intellectual property and the fee only applies if you intend to implement your own hardware commercially.

I'm constantly amazed at how much work is done to reinvent the wheel as far as ISAs are concerned, SPARC is an excellent platform and has an extremely high level of "shovel ready" hardware designs that you can just ship to a manufacturer and get back hardware. There is even open VHDL to fabricate modern high power CPU designs.

But the problems here are nothing to do with choice of ISA and everything to do with standardisation of the bringup/boot process.

Free/Open Source chips are a lovely idea that doesn't work without a financial sponsor because software can be made and distributed at near-zero marginal cost, including by the end user, but hardware can't.

> you can just ship to a manufacturer and get back hardware

So, why don't you do that? And if you wonder about others, especially big corporate guys, easy thinking would be that $100 isn't all you need to use SPARC, and it's cheaper for them to use something else. However, if you put it like that, you're a computer geek with zero insight into economics and marketing. The real answer is that it's more profitable for them to use something else than SPARC.

Not ARM, but there is http://www.lowrisc.org/, not sure of its status.

They are: http://www.96boards.org/

u-boot is pretty good, and the defacto "standard" for these kinds of things.

Microsoft have some kind of UEFI bootloader for the Pi2 for Windows 10 IOT.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com