Leah Rowe has written an interesting article about the history of the Libreboot project on the project's 10th anniversary. Recommended reading if you're interested in the open source firmware ecosystem.
Visit devever.net/~hl → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jan 2016 – Jul 2026
Web & Frontend 12Security & Privacy 11Hardware & Electronics 10Society, Policy & Culture 7Systems & Performance 5Networking & Internet 4
Modern smartphones have a CPU chip, and a baseband chip which handles radio network communications (GSM/UMTS/LTE/etc.) This chip is connected to the CPU via DMA. Thus, unless an IOMMU is used, the baseband has full access to main memory, and can compromise it arbitrarily.
They are unequal devices. Smartphones are unapologetically devices for consumption. In this regard they differ critically from PCs, because PCs are equal devices in the sense that the same device is used for creation and consumption. This means that anyone with a PC can create as well as consume, if they so wish. This…
The other day I rode on a Class 800 train in the UK. This is the “Intercity Express” train designed to replace the venerable HST (Intercity 125 with Mark 3 coaches, a train of which I have many memories and which I will dearly miss).
The Intel Management Engine is an auxillary microprocessor embedded into modern Intel x86 CPUs or chipsets. 1 It runs an Intel-signed proprietary binary blob. Due to code signing restrictions enforced by the hardware, it cannot be modified or replaced by the user. (AMD x86 CPUs have a similar auxillary microprocessor…
If you take someone with intermediate knowledge of computing in the right areas, and ask them how an x86 machine boots, they'll probably start telling you about how the CPU first comes up in real mode and starts executing code from the 8086 reset vector of FFFF:FFF0. This understanding of how an x86 machine boots has…
This is a rant about smartcards with some digression into ranting about the integrated circuit industry.
For some time now, I've been reverse engineering the firmware of the Broadcom BCM5719 Ethernet NIC chip, so that open source firmware can be produced for it. The BCM5719 is a PCIe chip which provides up to four Gigabit Ethernet ports, and is mainly intended for use in server applications. It can be used with the Linux…
Nowadays, there is increasing interest in adding tagged memory functionality to CPU architectures. Such architectures associate one or more tag bits with each quantum of a system's memory. There are many motivations for this ability to associate “metadata” with individual memory words, but one of the most clear is the…
Devices based on the i.MX8 or i.MX8M (such as the Librem phone or MNT Reform) have received popular coverage recently. The number of firmware blobs involved in the bringup of these devices is often a point of discussion. At times, people have considered whether some of these blobs could be replaced with libre…
A common myth about USB keyboards is that they can only support 6-key rollover, and not report more than 6 keys being pressed at a time. In fact, this is wholly untrue; the USB HID device class can support full N-key rollover (NKRO). While keyboards which purport to support USB NKRO are now common, some of them have…