the_panopticon

For "Get used to the lack of a C standard library" mentioned in https://kevinboone.me/efitest4.html there's always https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-libc.

And on "Be aware of the Windows-ness of EFI" commentary the resemblance to Windows coding style https://computernewb.com/~lily/files/Documents/NTDesignWorkb... is no accident. We leveraged this coding methodology as we evolved the original Intel Boot Initiative then EFI and then UEFI code and specification https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...

WFH and COVID accelerated meeting usage. I had a manager who claimed people also flocked to meetings during COVID and WFH because they were 'lonely.' But that same manager would kick people out of meetings if they weren't actively participating, too, so who knows.

I think the subsequent level is 'Distinguished Engineer.' That's terminal AFAIK. Maybe they'll need a 'Sr DE' someday?

This is great to see. Google has role-modeled open source hardware/silicon with efforts like https://opentitan.org/ and https://developers.google.com/silicon in the past, too. I wonder how this AI Coral NPU IP will differ from Nvidia's NVDLA https://nvdla.org/ effort with the ecosystem?

"History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes" - Mark Twain https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/mylifebits/

Very interesting. It sounds like tuning at the PTX level can increase workload efficiencies, such as quote "Specifically, we employ customized PTX (Parallel Thread Execution) instructions" from the DeepSeek folks https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19437.

Intel does have https://www.clearlinux.org/

+1, especially the 'Grand Inquisitor' portion. And a close 2nd would be Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment.'

This article is a nice addition to the community since rarely is a complete rewrite of a firmware corpus possible. Speaking of Rust and host or boot firmware, the recently published https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/surface-it-pro-blog/s... provides a nice experience report. Other work on moving Rust into EDKII for UEFI style firmware https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-staging/tree/edkii-rust is described in https://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/Enabling%20RU... and https://cfp.osfc.io/media/osfc2020/submissions/SLFJTN/resour.... There's also guidance on Rust for firmware in a book chapter https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4842-6106-4_....

This is a good read. Dr. Blaise Agüera y Arcas was a keynote speaker at https://attend.ieee.org/newera/program/ here in Seattle a week ago but he didn't really get a chance to delve deeply into his position. During his slot there ended up being a lot of back-and-forth about whether AGI truly achieved or just seeing ACI, etc, among the folks from MS, Meta, Google, UW, and even https://www.dia.mil/ rep.

"Universal" is also a term that doesn't typically engender happiness in technologists.

In Ocaml, interesting. I was similarly surprised when I learned that the firs Rust compiler was written in Ocaml, too https://users.rust-lang.org/t/understanding-how-the-rust-com...

This reminds me of the saying https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/success_has_many_fathers,_fai... that I’ve seen often played out in big companies, too.

There is still support for CSM in the open source https://github.com/tianocore/tianocore.github.io/wiki/Compat... and even nice projects like https://github.com/coreboot/seabiosto fabricate the CSM16 binary, but many vendors have stopped validating this path, including production of legacy BIOS option roms for adapters (net, gfx, etc) https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Legacy-BIOS-EOL-2020. I still believe CSP's maintain some of this support in their hypervisors' guest firmware for legacy OS binaries/ISO boot support? Also since Windows requires UEFI Secure boot enabled by default and CSM has to be disabled for the UEFI secure boot path, this is another reason legacy BIOS boot isn't exercised so much these days. We could have added legacy oroms hashes to UEFI Secure boot implementations https://patents.google.com/patent/US8694761B2/en, too, but again folks pushed back in their zeal to remove legacy BIOS overall. We didn't add the CSM spec https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents... to the PI https://uefi.org/specs/PI/1.8A/ since folks were hoping UEFI would remove the need for CSM. I still remember being challenged in the early 2000's by a long-time BIOS mgr at Intel "Is removing legacy a good idea with EFI? You know, we're really at legacy."

Fascinating work. The ARC std https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_(specification) was used to boot the Dec Alpha Windows machines, along w/ MIPS, etc. Anyone know of other open source variants of that in the wild? At intel in 1998 the original efi spec was modeled on & inspired by Arc. The Intel boot initiative (IBI) in fact looked mostly like Arc. EFI (now UEFI) is sort of Arc + installable GUID-based interfaces (aka protocols) a la MS COM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model. Page 8 of https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents... recounts some of those travails.

Seems to be a trend including work like https://www.linuxboot.org/.

I recall trying to debug a crash in QNX during the mid-90's. I was impressed by the svelte OS that could load from a 3.5" floppy. The failure scenario was coincident with one of my first tasks as a BIOS engineer and it entailed adding some custom error logging in System Management Mode (SMM). Luckily for me it turned out that I had forgotten to save/restore certain general purpose registers around my SMM logic. Fun times. SMM is pretty good at 'breaking' operating systems :)

Weaponizing data for ads and https://nypost.com/2024/06/06/business/costco-to-stop-sellin.... Feels about right for our post modern world.

Some interesting links on topic at bottom of https://www.rioslab.org/2023/04/14/open-source-hardware-ip-r...

Reminds me of article https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/04/17/what-happens-when-hy...

RISC-V has defined support. See "3.4 The RV128I Base ISA" https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~krste/papers/EECS-2016-1.p.... You can find an emulator "RISC-V system emulator supporting the RV128IMAFDQC base ISA" https://bellard.org/tinyemu/, too.

An interesting example of that flocking from some tech talent in the Pacific Northwest https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/omniva-stealth-st...

Maybe baremetal BSD 4.4? That's the codebase for the Unix personality layer of OSX (which is Mach as ukernel + a Unix layer on top). Or FreeBSD like Netflix uses for their first-party servers?

Another great read from Shannon https://archive.org/details/bstj28-4-656

And there are the examples from host firmware, from FCode in OpenFirmware https://github.com/openbios?language=forth that booted the IBM, Sun, and PowerPC Macs https://github.com/openbios?language=forth to the UEFI world's EBC https://github.com/pbatard/fasmg-ebc

My self and a colleague who both grew up in Texas ended up on the west coast working for tech. I still recall his quote when leaving the big urban area of the west coast “I thought that we invented red necks in Texas.” People are people

Good stuff is happening here, such as security https://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Security and open source https://www.opencompute.org/projects/open-system-firmware

I recall working on this for synthesizing UEFI and Linux drivers https://trustworthy.systems/publications/nicta_full_text/769... back in the day. Luckily some of the artifacts made it to open source. Unluckily the generated source code was tough for humans to read and maintain. The readability of LLM-based source code solutions from tools like Github CoPilot is amazing in comparison.

There is a lot of room in the periodic table, too, as MS showed starting with https://www.servethehome.com/microsoft-azure-cobalt-100-128-...

AMD seems to be exploring quite a bit of open source firmware lately, including the thread on host firmware https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36331394