Hello everyone,
I’ve been wondering, why has no one built an entirely free (as in freedom) computer yet? For humans to be unable to share each other’s knowledge to build one of the most important technologies ever created for society, how is it that we have yet to have full knowledge about how our systems operate?
I get that companies are basically the ones to blame, and I know there are alternatives like the Talos II by Raptor Computing, but still, how do we not have publicly available full schematics for just one modern computer? I’m talking down to firmware-level stuff like proprietary ECs, microcode, hard drive/SSD firmware, network controllers, etc. How do we not have a fully open system yet?
The technology required to make a modern computer is, to say the least, not easily accessible. There are very few places we’re chips are made. A handful on the planet. I mean in large quantities.
Otherwise you have laboratories mostly that have the tools to make the chips.
It is technically possible to make a free computer. But it will be much more expensive and much worse. So why bother?
Investment… It’s a bit too simple to just say money, but investment wraps it up better. Chips may not be open source, but they are physically there to be taken apart and reproduced. That’s what a lot of those Chinese knockoff chips are (baring the ones where the designs are outright stolen). The only thing that stops you from doing the same thing as those bootleg fabs is being willing to soak time and resources into the project. It’s just a big project. Like a Bloomfield i7 (which is old and fairly large) has 731 million transistors in it…
Also on top of what other folks are saying, making a complete modern computer is really fucking hard.
No one is making a 3ghz CPU in their garage. Maybe folks are assembling stm32, or pis, or whatever into their own pcbs, but the machines that make the chips just aren’t hobby level yet. You just have to buy some stuff.
Maybe that’s not your point. Maybe you’re okay with the processor being closed because it is fucking hard to make.
Beyond the hardware now we’re talking making your own drivers and shit. There are resources out there like zephyr, but there’s millions of devices that aren’t covered.
Try writing your own SPI interface for an established MCU and a common periferal. Make sure you include crc, don’t skip it. Maybe skimp and do i2c. It’s fucking hard.
Absolutely, creating a complete modern computer is an incredibly complex task. Building a 3GHz CPU from scratch is a monumental challenge, and even assembling components like stm32 or Pis requires a level of expertise. Developing your own drivers, dealing with various peripherals, and ensuring compatibility is tough shit.
However, once the software is written and released under a Free Software license, it will be there forever. As you’ve already stated, it’s hard, but not impossible. I share your hope that one day we will reach the point where such endeavors become more feasible.
Linux exists, so I’m not sure what more you’re asking for at a software level.
You’re never going to get open source computer hardware. The machines that make the chips cost many, many millions of dollars.
Never say never. The phones in our hands are orders of magnitudes more powerful than the computer that took people into space and enabled landing on the moon. Eventually even today’s technology will be obsolete and potentially even easy to replicate in a garage. 2nm processes may be difficult, but 40nm process is certainly not impossible for hobbyists of the future.
Just to be clear how far behind the “hobby” microchip scene is, not to take anything away from the accomplishment, but the chip he made can’t do 1 + 1 yet. Don’t get the wrong idea from only reading the article title. No one is making pi chips in their garage.
No one claimed they’re making pi chips in their garage, it’s a modest start towards open-source hardware. One guy in a garage doing what thousands of skilled engineers and scientists devoted careers to make in expensive labs.
Thanks for the article, awesome read!
Some people are trying (RISC-V for instance) but as others pointed out it’s really really hard, especially if you want to make the whole computer free and open source.
First you need an architecture for pretty much all components if you want it to be truly free (how the CPU, ram, motherboard, etc. work, on paper).
Then you need to manufacture these components, and making a modern CPU is insanely complex, even more so when you have a brand new architecture.
Then you need software (firmware, drivers, etc.), and again, on a new architecture, stuff will work differently than it does on existing stuff. So people need to learn how to work on your platform to make software. And obviously you need to make it available to people by selling it somehow.
It’s technically doable but the investment (both monetary and humanly) would be massive and not really something anyone can start on their own as a hobby.This bird’s-eye view of the process really sells it short. “making a modern CPU is insanely complex” doesn’t even scratch the surface of chip fab.
I mean, some guy did make his own lithography setup in his garage, and last we heard he had managed to fit 1,200 transistors on the same chip. This is just a few transistors shy of the 6,000,000,000 transistors in Intel’s Rocket Lake die.
So if you want your PC to do much beyond blink an LED, you need an industrial photolithography machine. And of course, that entails a clean room, specialized HVAC and sanitation equipment (Intel’s clean rooms have less tolerance for contaminants than hospital clean rooms). Then it’s only a matter of getting the rest of the chip fabrication machines (because the process requires more precision than a human hand). And materials that have extremely specific proportions and purities.
And so it only costs a few hundred million dollars to just make a cpu. And even that was still just glossing over some of the most ridiculous, precise, specialized and esoteric marvels of science and engineering humanity has ever come up with.
Now it’s just a matter of just making all the other parts.
I saw a snake-oil kickstarter for one of these about ten years ago.
I used to use the Trisquel forums, Trisquel being a fully-free operating system and at the time the only one that could be installed by a total novice. There was a guy there, Chris, who was heavily involved with the company ThinkPenguin. Chris seemed genuinely passionate about free software and actually seemed pretty genuine when plugging his products, he’d point out the specific points where his products failed to be fully free and sometimes give examples of competitors who could do better and some justification for why he didn’t feel it was realistic for ThinkPenguin to match that. I had some respect for him and some of the stuff he wrote on that forum really helped me understand the movement better.
Anyway, like ten years ago someone made a post about a kickstarter for a new company called Purism, which was fundraising to build a fully free high-end laptop I think by the end of that calendar year. A couple hours later the CEO of Purism (his name was Todd) found his way to that thread and explained to us how exciting this was and he intends to use Trisquel as the operating system and we should totally support this financially, blah blah blah. He’s giving lengthy replies to every single comment made in that thread. At some point Chris writes an extremely extensive response about why every detail Todd has promised does not seem realistic, including recognizing from the kickstarter photos exactly which computer Todd intended to use as a base and why he felt that choice made no sense. I didn’t really understand any of the details here to be honest, but yeah. Todd gives a one-sentence reply to Chris’ post where he addresses zero of Chris’ points and instead simply tells us that Chris is slandering his project because Chris is afraid of seeing a competitor succeed and doesn’t actually care about free software.
At that point I didn’t really need to understand the finer points to figure out which one of the two was more reliable. It was so blatantly transparent that Purism became a running joke in the forums.
Todd obviously ended up backtracking on virtually everything, using a brilliant scheme of weakening the promises in the kickstarter description over and over and over and dodging questions about that. He made a bunch of petitions to the FSF to certify his stuff on the grounds that their certification requirements (all those details initially promised for his laptops) were unrealistic to achieve. No shit. He also created an online (change.org? not sure about that) petition to Intel, which was sure-fire going to work, I’m pretty confident Intel did remove their management engine because I definitely would have heard more about that if Intel inexplicably decided to ignore that change.org petition.
Oh yeah, and on top of that, because Trisquel was the only FSF-endorsed distribution that was realistic for general-purpose use, he also ended up blowing a bunch of the funding to make his own distro (called “PureOS”) because if he stuck with using Trisquel his customers could easily end up on a forum where his products weren’t taken seriously.
Anyway, his initial kickstarter got like $600,000. He did release a laptop which was functional but not really different from things other companies like Los Alamos and ThinkPenguin had been doing for a while. A few years later he promised a fully libre phone and I think got even more for that than the laptop kickstarter. Last I heard only a very tiny fraction of the orders had actually been filled, and people were upset about that because it was already a few years late and also the company was desperately trying to remove all evidence that full refunds on request had been promised for the first couple years of preorders. Also the phones remained like six times as expensive as the (at the time) new pinephones and only functional for people who were extremely generous with how they define the word “functional”.
I’ll admit I did find some entertainment in this, but overall this shit was really depressing because not only could the funding Purism got have gone to other projects, but, more significantly, everyone who got scammed will be much more hesitant about supporting libre projects in general.
edit: Just checked /r/purism, the sidebar reads “PLEASE! Read at least 10 posts here before considering whether to place a Librem order! :) System76 is also a great alternative for Linux laptops.” Sounds like a community of happy customers.
To add to what has already been said about it taking a large effort, the follow up question is then, why don’t governments fund all this effort publicly through taxes, like what is done with roads, scientific research, education, healthcare?
Well the short answer is that high-performance computing specifically is a strategic resource. Publicly funding roads only benefits the country doing the funding, so that is an easy decision to make. Meanwhile, much of the publicly funded scientific research has minimal to no strategic value (or may only be of value in states capable of that investment in the first place), so this is also an easy decision to make. But giving away technological investments in strategic ressources to rival states is a pretty bad move.
The government might maintain the roads but they don’t pay for your car, and they try not give their enemies tanks.
They absolutely do fund development like this. But they keep it for themselves until such time that it no longer gives them a competitive edge.
For example, when the US sells tanks or planes to other countries, those export versions have much less fancy equipment on the inside. Or in pure science like cryptography, you can assume that when the NSA publicly approves of an algorithm, they’re confident that they can break it if they really need to (either because they inserted a backdoor, have identified a weakness they can exploit, or just have no use for it any more themselves).
I’m keeping an eye on this System 76 is creating a new laptop. Not that every hardware well be open source, but whatever you get
Because money
It’s sad but true. I’m just so baffled as to why? Wouldn’t anyone just be curious to figure out how stuff works? Think of all the brilliant minds out there who are being cut off simply because of corporate greed. Not only that, but they’re deemed as criminals for making it do something it wasn’t intended to do (e.g. Xbox 360 w/ RGH). I just think we’re wasting so much potential to make the world a better place. And we can already see the love behind just using and creating software while following the Free Software philosophy.
My goal is to help people, maybe you or anyone else might be interested, to get to actually USE their computers, understand how they work, etc.
The creator of Libreboot, Leah Rowe, and I are making support for the Dell Optiplex 9020 MT. It’s a motherboard that supports a i7 4790K, 32GB DDR3 RAM, you can also use a 2080 SUPER (or anything else), without the need for any proprietary BIOS firmware (eventually, we still need to reverse engineer 1-2 blobs). It has internal flashing capabilites, so no need to buy flashing equipment, all you need is an insulated screwdriver to short one of the SERVICE_MODE pins, which unlocks the flash chip basically. This allows you to flash the firmware through the OS, which makes it 10x easier for anyone to start using Libreboot. The motherboard you can buy on eBay right now for about $20, or you can buy the whole PC for like $100-$120. Still though, isn’t enough but it will be a step in the right direction.
I’m just so baffled as to why?
Why haven’t you? Same thing applies for everyone else.
If you had the skill to make an actually useful modern computer you probably work somewhere like that as your job, and you sure as shit don’t want to do that at home too. Especially since you’d probably never make any of your monetary investment back, let alone paying for your time.
While I understand the challenges you’re pointing out, it’s crucial to acknowledge that not everyone working on personal projects expects immediate financial gains. Some individuals are motivated by a passion for exploration and a desire to contribute to open and accessible technology. Even if replicating a professional-grade computer at home is challenging, there’s value in fostering a community-driven approach to technology, aiming for transparency and independence from corporate interests. The pursuit of knowledge and the potential for positive societal impact can be significant motivators, transcending immediate financial returns.
Sure. And the number of people who would do it purely because they want to is a tiny fraction of people who do it for pay. To pay those people you need profits, to get profits you need to be special, to be special you can’t share your trade secrets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRISC they kind of have
People are kinda working on it. The hardware isn’t FOS but openPOWER and people like this guy: https://www.devever.net/~hl/ortega are making foss firmware possible.
