i'll be at @SeaGL

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

i'll be at @SeaGL this year with some of the @alpinelinux and @postmarketOS crew, also giving a talk on Alpine's loongarch64 port landing in 3.21

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

now, why do I care about loongarch? the answer is ironic: freedom

loongarch represents something very useful to my freedom agenda: a platform which is mostly untainted by influences that wish to compromise my software freedom (e.g. no Intel ME, AMD PSP, TrustZone, etc.) for their own purposes.

loongarch does not have any of these things. it is basically a classical ACPI system in all senses. it has a hardcoded boot block that it starts executing from and that's it.

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

this means that in effect, loongarch machines are *great* targets for coreboot. you can take a current 3a6000 desktop, put coreboot-based firmware on it, and have an easily vettable root of trust for your computing.

we aren't *quite* there yet, but it is an achievable target

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

"but ariadne, you can get risc-v stuff for this already"

sure, in theory. however, there aren't any risc-v machines out there which have comparable performance profiles, there just isn't, not even the milk-v pioneer.

but you can get a 3a6000 desktop board on aliexpress for $400 and have a working system with similar clock-for-clock performance to zen 2.

that's actually a really big deal given how good of a target it is for a coreboot port

bt444

@ariadne I got a roma pad 2 and was surprised it can stream 1080p vids no problem. So the risc-v processors are definitely improving in leaps and bounds. That cpu maker, spacemit, also make risc-v server cpus.

Phil

@ariadne Where are they on power draw?

Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

@ariadne Well Loongson also has history in providing machines without compromises to software freedom.

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@lanodan modern loongson machines are binary blob edk2 builds tho

Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

@ariadne So I guess that's worse than risc-v, at least the VisionFive2 which has nearly entirely done their mainlining process (hence why I bought it).
While I couldn't find that for anything MilkV, their website is like sales-material with very little tech information, which doesn't makes me want to buy anything from them.

Loongarch… I'll have to check more but blobbed edk2 is kind of sad.

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@bt444 video playback isn’t a useful metric for a lot of reasons, last but not least that there is usually a DSP coprocessor which handles video playback

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@phil less than 15w without gpu

Ayush Agarwal

@ariadne I wish such exotic hardware was available somewhere else besides AliExpress because AliExpress is banned here in India.

gaytabase

@ariadne hoping that'll change soon. the new RV spec looks like quite a good base - i can write serious software with what's there.

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@lanodan i’m actively porting coreboot so…