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?
This covers just the basic cpu instructions, no proprietary extensions, no architecture of additional necessities like a gpu, no proprietary firmare for the gpu or anything else. The instruction set of Arm, x86 or whatever is not a secret though. The freedoms in risc-v are mostly concerning the manufacturers, which can build chips using this instruction set without paying any royalties. From a consumer point of view, that at most means one can at most choose from a more organically grown landscape of risc-v chips. Which in turn bears the risk of ending up in a situation, where all we have is a vast jingle of cluttered proprietary extensions, that make it harder to write libre drivers for than it is for Arm today.
Don’t get me wrong, risc-v is absolutely amazing! But in terms of freedomness, it would take a manufacturer to extend the spirit of open hardware to the complete SOC - and the basic instruction set is pretty much the smallest piece in that.
