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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

I remember the Loongson MIPS laptop made headlines many years ago. Richard Stallman even used one for a while.

It got a lot of attention among my hacker space fellows, but I don't remember why. Was it an open hw design or something?

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I believe the BIOS was open or something like that. In general, though, it is hard to have a meaningful consistent position here because you can have most of the software be open and some random peripheral with closed firmware can DMA all over everything it wants :/

That issue can be dealt with using an IOMMU under host control. Those limit where the peripheral can DMA regardless of its firmware.

Isn't this just an instance of "trusting trust?" How do you know the IOMMU hasn't been backdoored? "Open" firmware doesn't mean open RTL. Where is the line drawn?

Whether you want open firmware in the first place is a significantly different question from how you isolate hardware with closed firmware.

But more directly, worrying about one part having a backdoor is a lot better than worrying about twenty parts having a backdoor.

Just an example, DARTs and IOMMUs help close down that line of attack but there are still many proprietary and inscrutable blobs/peripherals/monitors that alter the behavior of modern computers which are almost impossible to avoid in general.

I used to have one as my only laptop for years and I miss it dearly. Built quality was above average, keyboard was great, mate screen (not as rare back then though), easy to open, lack of hardware shenanigans and usable/open source BIOS, no proprietary drivers required, came with Linux preinstalled. Reasonably fast.

It was a MIPS little endian, which is also very good. I can't remember if it was fanless or not.

Ten years ago it was kinda the only x86 alternative available in a laptop form factor, but was otherwise unremarkable except for being quite buggy.

I don't know if this is statement accurate, but from the (archived) manufacturer's website:

"The world's first fully free software. All system source files(BIOS, kernel, drivers etc.) are free software, no close firmware needed." [0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160703160118/http://zkml.lemot...

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