Last I knew, all SBC’s had processors with proprietary ISA’s, closed source microcode, and manufacturer-signed bootloaders. GPU’s were universally using binary blob drivers and the attempts to reverse engineer open source drivers were in very early days.
What progress has been made? Do I still need nearly 20-year-old computer to run Linux without closed source code running at some point in the boot sequence?
I don’t have any practical reason for this, frankly. Just makes me feel good and it’s interesting work.
If anything it’s getting worse.
How so?
As SoCs constantly increase both in complexity and power, the amount and size of firmware has been increasing as well. It becomes more difficult to find hardware that runs without any close source component.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4PoWAsBOsFsv I don’t know how many boxes that checks for you but there is at least one risc-v SBC available
This is neat. I’m not sure how many boxes it ticks either, but RISC-V has definitely come a long way since the last time I checked in
