Other people’s thoughts on “Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms”
Saturday, July 2nd, 2016A couple of months ago, we had a brief discussion on the FSFE discussion mailing list about the topic of “Uncorrectable freedom and security issues on x86 platforms“, but it just came to my attention that a bunch of other people were discussing our discussion, too. Hacker News is, of course, so very “meta”, but fortunately they got onto discussing the actual topic as well.
The initial message in the original discussion advocated adopting the Power computing architecture as a primary hardware platform for Free Software. Now, the Hacker News participants were surprised that nobody mentioned SPARC and yet I was sure that SPARC did get mentioned in our discussion. A brief search doesn’t find any mention of it, however, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I do know about things like LEON and even used SPARC-based hardware for many years. (The Sun 4 workstations at my university had SPARC CPUs, for instance.)
I suppose the disconnect here involves price, availability and performance of readily-available products. Certainly, a free hardware SPARC implementation can be synthesised for an FPGA, but the previous discussion covered things like RISC-V in a similar fashion: it’s nice to have the ability to deploy a “soft processor” in an FPGA, but customers of computing products usually expect “hard” CPU performance. And you can at least buy ARM and MIPS CPUs, even if they aren’t free hardware implementations, having decent-enough performance which support Free Software from the very bottom of the software stack.
The participants in the meta-discussion wondered why MIPS became so popular given that there are licensing fees involved, whereas Sun made certain SPARC designs available under the GPL, and given that the SPARC architecture is supposedly royalty-free. For some manufacturers, this is asking the wrong question: they did not seek to license the patent-encumbered versions of the MIPS architecture; like the OpenRISC initiative, they merely implemented the unencumbered versions instead.
It would be nice to have a high-performance, inexpensive, readily-available free hardware CPU for use in free hardware designs. And of course those designs would support Free Software completely. But until that comes to pass, we have to work with what we can get. And indeed, for whichever architecture seems to be favoured for such a role, we also need to have usable and accessible hardware that is compatible with our favoured architecture so that we may prepare ourselves for the day it finally gets rolled out.
There might be a reason why SPARC isn’t so well supported by things like GNU/Linux distributions. Sadly, unlike various competitors, inexpensive SPARC products seem to be thin on the ground, and without those the efforts to maintain ports of large Free Software collections inevitably grind to a halt, but I would be only too happy for someone to point me to a source of products that I may have overlooked. There is no inherent reason why SPARC couldn’t be a viable platform for Free Software, regardless of what people may have to say about register windows!