[TUHS] Re: The death of general purpose computers, was - AIX moved into maintainance mode

["G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>]

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At 2023-01-20T07:56:41-0800, Rich Morin wrote:
> One of the problems that cell phones solve is providing (relatively)
> instant-on capability.  The RasPi processor doesn't have hardware
> support for this; dunno which others might...

At 2023-01-20T16:24:50+0000, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> If that means I don't have the whole jumble of other problems I'd have
> with owning a traditional smartphone, I can deal with actually turning
> it on and off with a full boot cycle.  Frankly the "always on" kinda
> disturbs me, so just one more thing I get better control of.

Can someone characterize why solving this problem and having (near)
instant-on for such a device would be hard?  Lack of support for
low-power states in the CPU or on the board?

I don't see a huge gap between having to key in something to unlock my
phone versus a restoring from suspend-to-disk with a LUKS passphrase.
If you've suspended to disk you're pretty safe to operate in as
low-power a mode as you want.

> Not to drift the conversation too much though, towards the end of
> general purpose computing, I like that idea too because the particular
> single board I have in mind (a RISC-V one I've got)

I have heard that firmware blobs are just as ubiquitous and hard to
eliminate on RISC-V boards as they are everywhere else.  This is a real
problem for establishing a trusted computed base.  It seems everybody
who makes support chips is arc-welded to unverifiable code.  We'll have
to replace the stuff ourselves, slowly and painfully.  I submit that the
only way to win that battle in the long run is to copyleft it; otherwise
the community's work will simply wind up re-closed, with new features to
sell the board, and new backdoors thanks to sloppy bugs and friendly
handshakes from friendly guys in suits.

I'd love to be wrong about this.  Does someone have a curated list of
free firmwares for support chips (or SoC modules)?  Mondo bonus points
for them being written in a verifiable language like Spark/Ada.  Sorry
if I made you spit your coffee out there.  I think I know how far we are
from a better world.

> also has a traditional HDMI port and 4 USBs, and ethernet, so if I do
> it right, I have a mobile that I can also plug in K&M and a monitor to
> and use at a desk.  Society can pry my desk computing from my cold,
> dead hands, I've never felt as productive using a computing device in
> any other context.

Yup, that is very close to what I want in a so-called "convergence"
device.  The _ideal_ for me personally would be to put it in a clamshell
with an LCD over a Happy Hacking Keyboard.  That's the perfect form
factor (and key layout) for me.  I'd tote that thing everywhere.

Regards,
Branden

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