>On Mon, 18 May 2026 21:29:16 +0900 >[email protected] wrote:
> If we reach that point, what meaningful agency would remain for the > user in operating a computer, and would that level of constrained > control still justify calling it a general-purpose system? Formally speaking, that point has been crossed in an absolute sense sometime around 1990, with the introduction of SMM in 386 and 486 CPUs. Since the rise of ARM as a major computing platform (ARM always includes some sort of a "trusted" execution environment), coupled with IME and it's twin on AMD chips, the point has basically been crossed in all meaningful ways. What's to be done? Well, excepting use of ancient 386 CPUs or building general-purpose computers with overgrown Z80's, we do have these things called FPGA chips. Some of them are monsters that have as many logic gates as the early SoC's from 2010's and can push those gates at or over 1GHz. There are also more modest FPGAs, and among these you can find quite a few models that can be used to build a FOSH computer. Until foundry access becomes democratized, this is the way to go if you want CONTROL over your computing. https://github.com/YosysHQ/nextpnr (The relevance of all this to 9fans is that Plan 9 is sufficiently simple that it might be the best previously-existing OS to port to these to-be-made FOSH computers. Which reminds me, I need to look into the Plan 9 VM.) -- Svi moji e-mailovi su kriptografski potpisani. Proverite ih. All of my e-mails are cryptographically signed. Verify them. -- You don't need an AI for a robot uprising. Humans will do just fine. --
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