09-13-2019, 05:38 PM
All the years, board schematics and bioses have been closed source (at least for remotely usable hardware). Pine64 is doing something exciting. They build a fully functional laptop and open source major parts: board schematics (not yet) and major parts of the boot process. Let's see where we are in 15 years.
z4v4l, you are right in as long as there is one single proprietary component, there can't be complete trust. But the more parts are open, the more difficult it is to technically compromise trust. This builds some trust.
In this thread, I briefly explained how AST2500 is booting up https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...9#pid49759 That's very elegant. BTW: on our spi bus, we have a mux. So, if we brick our primary spi boot flash, we can switch to the secondary spi boot flash, boot from there and repair our primary boot flash. Almost fool-proof. Well, then one can always physically replace the bricked spi-flash with a working one.
z4v4l, you are right in as long as there is one single proprietary component, there can't be complete trust. But the more parts are open, the more difficult it is to technically compromise trust. This builds some trust.
In this thread, I briefly explained how AST2500 is booting up https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...9#pid49759 That's very elegant. BTW: on our spi bus, we have a mux. So, if we brick our primary spi boot flash, we can switch to the secondary spi boot flash, boot from there and repair our primary boot flash. Almost fool-proof. Well, then one can always physically replace the bricked spi-flash with a working one.