SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
It doesn't look like the Talos Secure Workstation will see the light of day with it's crowdfunding campaign ending this week and it's coming up more than three million dollars short of its financing goal. [Editor note: It did not meet the funding goal.] Now there's another effort to offer a libre system but using off-the-shelf x86 hardware.
[...] Libreboot developer Leah Rowe is now launching a libre system out of the ashes of the Talos Secure Workstation. She wrote in an email to Phoronix, "It's a high-end desktop/server platform, available in either configuration. It also supports virtualization and PCI passthrough, unlike older systems, so Qubes would be compatible...TALOS looks set to fail. Crowd Supply has removed it from their homepage, and Raptor Engineering is writing up an announcement that TALOS is shutting down - they are going to link to Minifree and tell people to purchase Libreboot D16 from me."
But before getting too excited, this isn't a new platform but rather an existing AMD server motherboard that simply comes pre-loaded with Libreboot to free the firmware/BIOS and then loaded with Debian GNU/Linux. The desktop and server versions make use of an AMD Opteron 6272, a.k.a. the older 32nm "Interlagos" CPUs derived from Bulldozer and released back in 2011.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @05:28PM
It's clear from recent years that current computing giants are going to be producing inherently broken systems; the only viable solution is to take your ball and go to a different court.
It would be nice to see those who are interested in the libre philosophy put all of their effort into pushing a fundamentally libre computing system from the ground up—sure it will be shit at first, but what is the alternative? 6-year old (and ever aging) tech that is getting no improvement?
The future is RISC-V, or something like it. Please, put your brains behind that. Let's escape, a grovel no more.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:19PM
I wish I still had mod points.
RISC-V or something like it is the only way that the public will be able to protect itself at the hardware level.
If a state actor, including your own government, can compromise your system security at the hardware level, then we're all skroowed.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday January 19 2017, @01:13AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @06:09AM
As long as the tech can be developed by "the community", then that's fine. It's the ability to improve in a particular direction that is valuable; current tech is a totally captured.