| This is nonsense. What you describe is the current state of affairs for CPUs. Intel, AMD, ARM, and every other company working in this space already "put all of their stupidity inside it in the name of features and security". These companies will continue to "put all of their stupidity inside" their products as long as innovation continues. As Spectre and Meltdown demonstrated, bugs like these occurred in almost every CPU that allows speculative execution. Open projects will simply address these bugs as they are discovered just as private companies do for their proprietary design. Openness is orthogonal to this class of bugs. > The entire time of kernel devs will be spent working around the various 'features' of the OEM designs. No they wont. If a CPU spec is implemented by a large number of vendors, kernel devs will (must?) treat their support as they treat peripherals: They will provide support for the baseline CPU as is described in the open spec. Additional support is supplied either by the manufacturer or by volunteers who want to take advantage of additional features. > But putting everything up on GitHub is a recipe for disaster. I'll gladly take fragmentation if it means that we are no longer forced to accept ME, PSP, or TrustZone. Competition and diversity is a good thing. It's having only closed CPUs that's the recipe for disaster. |