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2024-10-29.log
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<fossy>i'm still very conflicted on my thoughts about the hardware bootstrapping problem <fossy>i don't take the view including bootstrapping the whole fabrication process - my position is to treat the fabrication process as a black box that introduces some kind of distrust (and then on-die firmware like intel ME as a lot more distrust) <fossy>& so depending on the level of distrust you're comfortable with you have different starting points <fossy>but i can't decide whether something like a fpga-emulated riscv core is sufficient (which also introduces the problem of compiling the core) <fossy>or whether actual hand-built hardware is at all worthwhile <lanodan>I think in terms of trust I'd rather use cross-compiling so it's a bit like Diverse Double Compiling, hardware edition. Although there should still be the goal of finding a trustworthy computer. <fossy>yeah, I tend to agree in terms of mitigating distrust of hardware <fossy>only really feasible for open architectures I think though <fossy>(some problem with DCC now, clang/gcc duopoly in the (open) compiler land makes it difficult to effectively execute DCC) <lanodan>And part of the problem is even if say you'd have a trustworthy computer but only capable of disassembling programs to check the work of less trustworthy computers, you'd then need a lot of human time for inspection. <fossy>these are difficult problems, that's for sure :D