Transparency in Hardware/Software Interfaces | Hacker News Reader

Transparency in Hardware/Software Interfaces

rfd.shared.oxide.computer

31 pointsbcantrill5 comments

Let’s face it, if you guys pick up steam, you’ll be doing your own hardware. It’ll be amazing that if that happens, you’ll also sell that hardware so that other Oxides can bloom, but you won’t and your excuse will be economic.

The problem is none of these hardware vendors have enough customers for them to be open with their specs. Even if they did, the majority of their customers would not have the expertise that you’ve hired for to competently take advantage of that interface. Instead, they’ll lob some HAL code at the customer, and if their orders are big enough, give them support. Internally, these hardware vendors will have multiple sourcetrees for each customer, and one customer’s fix will not be reflected in anothers for fear that it’ll break whatever the other customer is doing with it.

That said, I hope you guys are supremely successful and spark a change in culture.

To be clear, we already do our own PCBs -- we just don't do our own ASICs (which is who this RFD is really aimed at). I don't think it's impossible that we would/will do our own silicon, but it's still pretty far out. If we were to do our own silicon, it's easier for me to promise that we would be transparent about it (interface and implementation) than it is to promise that we would sell it. (You may think economics is an excuse, but I would think of it more as a reason!)

As for existing hardware vendors: note that one of the examples is AMD and their openSIL effort. I don't want to speak out of turn, but I think it's very fair to say that Oxide influenced AMD with respect to openSIL -- And the presence of openSIL allowed us to open our host boot software.[0] So there is reason for hope -- and on parts that in fact have lots of customers.

Thank you for wishing us well -- we are indeed trying to not just ship products but also change the culture!

[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0241 RFD 241 Holistic Boot

FYI the link to dendrite doesn't work, it returns 404, perhaps you forgot to mark it as public?

https://github.com/oxidecomputer/dendrite

It's a private repo for now because of some proprietary third-party stuff in there. I think we will be able to make it public but we have to clean things up.

That is the case, and it may happen soon, but absolutely zero promises about that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com