On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 10:33 AM, rysiek rysiek@hackerspace.pl wrote:
Overall thoughts?
Will the Purism Librem laptops be supported? (#librem) Probably not. There are several privacy, security and freedom issues with these laptops, due to the Intel chipsets that they use. See #intel. There are signed proprietary blobs which cannot be replaced (e.g. Intel Management Engine and CPU microcode updates). It uses the proprietary Intel FSP blob for the entire hardware initialization, which Intel won't provide the source code for. The Video BIOS (initialization firmware for the graphics hardware) is also proprietary.
It will likely take many years to replace even one of these blobs, let alone all of them. Some of them (ME firmware and microcode) can't even be replaced, which immediately disqualifies these laptops from being added to libreboot. Google engineers have tried for many years to get source code from Intel, and to reverse engineer the blobs that Intel provides. So far, they have been unsuccessful. Google is also one of the companies that funds the coreboot project, and they hire a lot of the core developers, so it's not like they don't have vast resources at their disposal. Smaller companies have no chance.
It's a shame, because these laptops would be perfect for libreboot.
http://libreboot.org/faq/#librem
Pozdrawiam,