On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 4:38 PM, ronwirring@safe-mail.net wrote:
Thank you for the information. I have watched a rutkowska video on how complicated intel's management features are. Difficult.
That's why I'm here, lol. The Intel stuff is getting bad enough that it has me wondering what I can do for the open source hardware world. Moving to ARM via EOMA68 is a good near-term solution, but even that's not going to be 100% trustable at lest by bunnie's standards in the lecture. Something like RISC-V has the potential to get there, but as he pointed out, even that's not completely open. I think right now the important thing is to just be an early adopter of this stuff to show that the market's there. bunnie broke the demographics down pretty well, there's definitely money to be made. Back to Intel though. It makes me want to jump on eBay and pick up some older vintage Intel CPU's that didn't have the management features, but obviously there's no way to know if those aren't blown wide open by other means. Man, very interesting times we live in.
Remarkable that you cannot do a verification using a microscope.
You can do exactly this, and it'll get you to maybe 99% of the way there. Companies like ChipWorks do exactly this for money. Others do it for hobby (see: http://www.visual6502.org/, http://siliconpr0n.org/, https://zeptobars.com/en/, http://www.righto.com/). It can often get great results. bunnie was playing devils advocate by saying even if you did this, there are still things that can be present but in an obfuscated manner, that could be malicious or careless. This doesn't really mean to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Having a reverse engineered CPU with a small possibility of shenanigans is still better than having a 100% proprietary CPU or a 50% proprietary CPU. Security through obscurity and all that.
We should have libre software hdds and ram.
Can you elaborate on that a bit? I don't understand what you mean.