Submitted 3 months ago by schizoidman@lemmy.zip to technology@lemmy.world
Our hardware has its own problems.
We rely way too much on x86 and ia64 architecture, both of which have only two big manufacturers in the world. That’s not good because it’s almost monopolies.
It would be better to have simpler chipsets that can be produced by more manufacturers worldwide, and especially ones that can be produced by smaller regional manufacturers.
RISC-V
hell yeah risc-v is hella cool :)
Yes, RISC-V largely forms the basis for china’s future tech “independence”. Most CPU’s are Chinese brands and SBC’s like SiFive are Chinese too.
RISC-V is this
Those are called duopolies (yes it’s a very common thing)
On top of that we shouldn’t distribute compiled binaries for the x86 and ia64 chipsets; instead program code should be distributed like .wasm, in a hardware-independent way, and compiled on the target device. That would enable that hardware can use any chipset it wants and there are no software incompatibilities because of it.
You’re describing Gentoo Linux . . . which is not especially popular among Linux distributions even though it runs on just about anything. There may be a reason for that.
Well, they’re talking about something lower level than the operating system. For one.
Secondly, every distributor is inferior to the only perfect thing mankind has ever created: Hannah Montana Linux. If you’re using anything else you may as well just break your computer and drink cyanide.
I have been waiting impatiently for WASM to really take off. I’d imagine that some day, it will be the most popular way to build software.
But isn’t WASM for web browsers? How will it be used to build general software
On the high performance compute / GPGPU side the AdaptiveCPP JIT compiler seems very good for cross-platform operation
How is performance though?
And honestly ARM isn’t that much than x86 in terms of freedom and competition.
OpenBoot at Sun and Apple had a ggo thing going for a while. Too bad they didn’t release it as open source. In theory you could deliver architecture-independent drivers that ship as firmware on device.
Do we really need a UEFI replacement?
Probably not. At least not right now. Bit China needs one apparently.
My thoughts are “Why do they need one?”. It’s not like UEFI stops you doing anything.
UBIOS’s unique features over UEFI include increased support for chiplets and other heterogeneous computing use-cases, such as multi-CPU motherboards with mismatching CPUs, something UEFI struggles with or does not support. It will also better support non-x86 CPU architectures such as ARM, RISC-V, and LoongArch, the first major Chinese operating system.
[citation needed]
I would say this is about increasing the level of control of the platform, not about technological issues.
It’s about national security. They don’t want to risk using something that they don’t control for the same reason the US doesn’t want to risk using something they don’t control. It’s why Intel probably can’t fail. If Intel goes down then the US doesn’t have a strong native CPU producer.
Yeah we should replace it with legacy bios.
For x86 or ARM?
I for one welcome this development. China, even if just out of national security interests, has proven to be quite a valuable partner in championing open source alternatives to Western technologies locked under key, proprietary licensing, and other such arrangements, which led to monopolies. China first started doing this with designing and actually building RISC-V architecture devices as a way to move away from x86 and ARM architectures. Now let’s hope that UBIOS will be supported in a similar, open source way, so that we can gain more sovereignty over our own devices.
oce@jlai.lu 3 months ago
Does that mean I will have more choice in which surveillance agency I want to be spied by?
salacious_coaster@infosec.pub 3 months ago
Maybe not, if Intel goes tits-up
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
Ouch.
UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world 3 months ago
UEFI is a standard, not a product. You could make your own even
the_boxhead@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
libreboot.org
Or use this…
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 3 months ago
could in the same sense that i could check all software i use for bugs and malicious code. realistically, i can’t, because it’s way too much work.
stupidcasey@lemmy.world 3 months ago
So that just means UBIOS is explicitly for spying since UEFI is open source and a standard right?
SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org 3 months ago
There's no need to change mobo to have that, just install Temu app or similars.