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posted by chromas on Monday July 23 2018, @10:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the drm dept.

Hugo Landau has written a blog post about why Intel will never let hardware owners control the Management Engine. The Intel Managment Engine (ME) is a secondary microprocessor ensconced in recent Intel x86 chips, running an Intel-signed, proprietary, binary blob which provides remote access over the network as well as direct access to memory and peripherals. Because of the code signing restrictions enforced by the hardware, it cannot be modified or replaced by the user.

Intel/AMD will never allow machine owners to control the code executing on the ME/PSP because they have decided to build a business on preventing you from doing so. In particular, it's likely that they're actually contractually obligated not to let you control these processors.

The reason is that Intel literally decided to collude with Hollywood to integrate DRM into their CPUs; they conspired with media companies to lock you out of certain parts of your machine. After all, this is the company that created HDCP.

This DRM functionality is implemented on the ME/PSP. Its ability to implement DRM depends on you not having control over it, and not having control over the code that runs on it. Allowing you to control the code running on the ME would directly compromise an initiative which Intel has been advancing for over a decade.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Tuesday July 24 2018, @03:24AM (3 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Tuesday July 24 2018, @03:24AM (#711552)

    I'm watching this little fellow: RockPro64 [pine64.org]

    From the forums it looks not ready for prime time for now, but look carefully at it. It or something like it is probably the future we seek. See that PCIe slot? It is "open ended" so it could accept a Radeon. Screw waiting for a reverse engineered Mali driver, Radeon is supported by AMD with open docs and developers. If the driver can be ported to ARM64 successfully one could have a quad core machine with 4GB of memory and a real desktop Linux running for $250. This particular product might also have a problem where a long PCIe card could get in the way of the eMMC slot. But if we see more PCIe slots appear on these little Arm boards, that is the way forward. Assuming they do not start getting "Management coprocessors" that can't be controlled.

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  • (Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday July 24 2018, @02:04PM (2 children)

    by bobthecimmerian (6834) on Tuesday July 24 2018, @02:04PM (#711725)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_graphics_device_driver#ATI/AMD [wikipedia.org] "The FOSS drivers for ATI-AMD GPUs are being developed under the name Radeon (xf86-video-ati or xserver-xorg-video-radeon). They still must load proprietary microcode into the GPU to enable hardware acceleration." (Emphasis mine.)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24 2018, @05:40PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24 2018, @05:40PM (#711795)

      It's microcode. I'm not sure that the "source" is anything more than comments next to blobs of bits?
      Maybe the industry has advanced but I'm not sure what there is to see

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @08:00AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @08:00AM (#717449)

        Seeing is one thing. Modifying and distributing another.