Alternatives to x86

[blackhole]

I'm not liking the direction in which x86 has been heading, I don't use high end hardware anyway, my current hardware is an old Athlon 64 X2 with 2GB of RAM. It's 10+ year old hardware and if it dies, I won't be replacing it with any more x86 hardware - especially not the new generation stuff with AMD PSP / Intel ME and all the UEFI/secureboot crap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_...ology#Security

I've looked at the alternatives and PowerPC seems the most viable, particularly Apple Power Mac G5's which I can get second hand, rather cheaply from ebay. And OpenBSD supports the macppc architecture.

But I'm a complete newbie to this architecture. Are there any pitfalls to look out for? I've noticed many have nvidia graphics cards, can these be easily replaced with an AMD graphics card or should I try to source something without an Nvidia GPU?

[psypro]

I keep a tab on Risc-v
Open source cpu, soc are avible.. powerful soc seems to come this or next year. Weak or lacking gpu.
But google and other big companies is onboard .. probably to keep arm license down or as yourself for better security in the long run.. It seems to be developing at a healthy pace now.

[TronDD]

Originally Posted by cynwulf

especially not the new generation stuff with AMD PSP / Intel ME and all the UEFI/secureboot crap.

People are working to disble that stuff.

https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner

https://www.coreboot.org/users.html

https://trmm.net/Heads_33c3

Maybe by the time you need to buy new hardware, there will be a way to have a fully clean system.

Tim.

[bsd-keith]

I don't think OBSD runs on ARM yet, but to get away from all the 'PC' 'extras' that seem to be getting added, I'm keeping an eye on (& may get) a Rasberry Pi3, (a starter kit only costs about £52).

[jggimi]

Originally Posted by bsd-keith

I don't think OBSD runs on ARM yet...

The first ARM architecture on OpenBSD was the cats architecture, circa 2004. But cats is no longer supported, and the armish and zaurus architectures are end-of-life with 6.0.

http://www.openbsd.org/cats.html
http://www.openbsd.org/armish.html
http://www.openbsd.org/zaurus.html (I love the photo)

The armv7 architecture had some significant improvements for 6.0, the largest operational change consolidated the three supported SoCs categories into a single kernel structure. There is active development both for the armv7 architecture, and for a future arm64 architecture.

http://www.openbsd.org/armv7.html

There are bulk builds of armv7 packages occurring now for -current. They were not being done at 6.0-release. The most recent bulk build has 7414 packages.

[e1-531g]

IIRC Raspberry has binary blob (but maybe they found workaround), so I don't think this ARM board is particularly suited for people scared by binary blobs. It does not have SATA. Ethernet is coupled with USB controller.

Anyway there are a lot of other ARM boards. Some are based on ARMv7 processors, some are on ARMv8 (also called AArch64, arm64). OpenBSD does not have support for AArch64, but ARMv8 can run in backward compatibility mode (ARMv7) and it seems that OpenBSD supports few of them. Probably getting LLVM Core/Clang into base tree was first step to support ARMv8.

BTW x86/amd64 hardware is still a attractive target. Other architectures also often have binary blobs. On the other hand there are x86 computers with removed blobs. OpenBSD have a lot of supported archs, but not archs all equal. Some have more packages, other have less. Some are more tested, other are less.

[bsd-keith]

Thanks for the links, but it doesn't look like it would run on the Rasberry Pi3.

Release date:February 29, 2016
Introductory price:US$35
Operating system:Raspbian, Ubuntu MATE, Kali Linux, Snappy Ubuntu Core, Windows 10 IoT Core, RISC OS, Debian, Arch Linux ARM
System-on-chip used:Broadcom BCM2837
CPU:1.2 GHz 64/32-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53
Memory:1 GB LPDDR2 RAM at 900 MHz
Storage:MicroSDHC slot
Graphics:Broadcom VideoCore IV at higher clock frequencies (300 MHz & 400 MHz) than previous that run at 250 MHz
Power:800 mA (4.0 W)

[jggimi]

No, Raspberries are not supported. But the Banana Pi is supported, because it uses the Allwinner SoC.

[jggimi]

Correction. The Raspberries are not supported yet.

[bsd-keith]

Now that is interesting!

Thanks for finding that, I'll have to try & remember to watch out for developments.

[psypro]

Originally Posted by jggimi

Correction. The Raspberries are not supported yet.

Hard to follow the cvs mailing list archive, all in the same thread.
I have several raspberry waiting for OpenBSD, I dont want to run Linux, it will only confuse me now, I want to use the limited time I have for this hobby to better understand and hopefully one day master OpenBSD.

So does anybody know, have any progress at al been made?

[jggimi]

You can search the CVS Changelogs -- much easier than trying to follow CVS Email archives. Usually, you'll only need the most recent file.

http://<Mirror>/pub/OpenBSD/Changelogs/

The most recent log is a file called "Changelog" and the most recent archive rollover was Changelog.51, in July of 2016.

---

Having just looked, I can see that the most recent log entry to mention the Raspberry was on January 3, 2017.

[blackhole]

I wouldn't bank too heavily on raspberry pi, Theo de Raadt has not had anything good to say on that subject.

Personally I'm not interested in ARM SoCs. Interesting that no one has anything to say about PowerPC thus far.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Originally Posted by e1-531g

OpenBSD does not have support for AArch64

There have been a few messages on the openbsd-tech mailing list about that, it is under development

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=148414039832557&w=2

[psypro]

Originally Posted by jggimi

Having just looked, I can see that the most recent log entry to mention the Raspberry was on January 3, 2017.

$ grep "raspberry" ChangeLog 
https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware
$ grep "Raspberry" ChangeLog  
Initial support for Raspberry Pi 2/3.  All the hard work done by 
patrick@, I
the Raspberry Pi Foundation git repository at
The device tree for the Raspberry Pi is somewhat in flux as bits and 
pieces
to support the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 are committed to the mainline Linux
Add the Raspberry Pi 2/3 devices here as well.
Banana Pi and Raspberry Pi 3.
should also work on Raspberry Pi (broadcom) armv7 platforms.

How can I see the dates, and more information around the post.. how do I tell grep to show some line after and before keyword..?

[jggimi]

Use less(1) or more(1) rather than grep.

[psypro]

less -I -p Raspberry ChangeLog

Use "n" to show next search hit.

[LeFrettchen]

Originally Posted by jggimi

Correction. The Raspberries are not supported yet.

Correction. The Raspberries are supported.
But poorly supported...

http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=9745

[jggimi]

Uh ... well. How do I say this?

That did not show --support-- poor or otherwise. It showed a RAMDISK kernel boot, a shell, and an ls(1) command.

[bsd-keith]

I'm reading 'Broadcom binary blobs' - so I'm guessing it will never run OpenBSD officially, which is a bit of a shame, as the platform does look to be interesting.
(It does run a few Linux variants though.)