Open-source firmware
Absolutely - nobody should accept anything less than a fully owner controlled and fully auditable system - especially when you&#x27;re providing secure networking services to customers. Good on them for porting coreboot to this new, modern supermicro platform - it&#x27;s a gargantuan amount of hard work and I&#x27;m glad they did it and published it.<p>However, I have to take issue with this statement:<p>&gt; This is the first time a modern off-the-shelf server platform gains coreboot support, and it is an integral part of realizing our vision of transparent and independently auditable VPN servers.<p>While this is the first modern coreboot system - it is not, by the implication, the first modern server system with fully open source firmware. In fact, I contend that the firmware isn&#x27;t even fully open source, nor is it fully auditable - the ME taint is still present, as the article clearly states.<p>(EDIT: I did not read the original article terribly clearly - it is extremely clear in this regard - and it doesn&#x27;t position the system as being &quot;fully&quot; open source. My mistake and I&#x27;m sorry. See comments below for response&#x2F;apology in response to author&#x27;s correction.)<p>In contrast, the Talos II server system, a POWER9 (powerpc64&#x2F;LE) system, by Raptor Computing Systems has been shipping for well over a year now - and it has fully open source firmware - and by that I mean <i>everything</i>, supported and developed by both the community, Raptor Computing, other OpenPOWER Foundation members and IBM.<p>The only remaining blob on the base Talos II system is the blob firmware for the onboard NICs - and that&#x27;s been fully documented and clean-room reverse engineered and the replacement open source project is just about completed (project ortega). It&#x27;s already usable in beta form, but if it&#x27;s an issue for you until them - disable them and use an add-in card.<p>However, unlike the Xeon platform referenced as being the first modern coreboot server platform, the Talos II, or any other OpenPOWER system, does <i>not</i> have an invasive management engine in every CPU you have zero access to with zero auditability.<p>It&#x27;s not enough for the firmware to be open source, I want my systems documentation to look like this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.raptorcs.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Category:Documentation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.raptorcs.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Category:Documentation</a> - so that I can write that firmware if I have to. I seriously doubt the supermicro board would include schematics, like the Talos II or Blackbird does, either.<p>That said, if instead the existing open source firmware, you really want coreboot - which the Talos II does not yet support - for a specific reason - it&#x27;s being actively ported to the platform, but not out of necessity, instead it&#x27;s an exercise in open source firmware diversity - as it should be.<p>If you want a fully auditable, owner controlled, open source platform for your VPNs, or for any other application, x86 based systems aren&#x27;t it - because, by Intel&#x27;s ME and AMD&#x27;s PSP designs, they can&#x27;t be.