On Thu, Dec 30, 2021 at 12:19:14 +0100, Vitaly Zaitsev via devel devel@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
On 30/12/2021 09:21, Chris Murphy wrote:
CPU is proprietary, the firmware is proprietary. Guess we can't trust our computers?
RISC-V.
RISC-V isn't the answer. It is an ISA (with varients), not a computer. A RISC-V based computer has the same issues as other computers.
Computers can be trusted to some extent, because useful, hard to detect misexecution is hard outside of some special instructions (such as random number generators).
You can purchase computers today without proprietary firmware in key areas. (Essentially you can limit proprietary firmware to denial of service attacks.) Look into Raptor Computering Services Blackbird or Talos 2 power 9 based systems if you are interested. These are not cheap consumer machines; so they aren't for everyone.
You can go lower down the stack and use free computer implementations. For example Microwatt is a power ISA implementation for FPGAs. You still have to worry about trusting FPGAs, but you can do more about that than you can with proprietary computers. Bunny Huang has written about trusting FPGAs as part of his precursor project.