Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by 153791098c 2886 days ago
But not on AMD machines from 2012 and before. You can buy a high-end motherboard (KGPE-D16) that can run libreboot and 2 16core Opteron 62xx cpu's with 192GB ram. You don't have to go the old and relatively slow thinkpad route to achieve freedom.
1 comments
confounded 2886 days ago
Thank you for this information!

I’m interested in something like this (though maybe not as beefy) for self-hosting.

Are there any companies that sell the gear you describe, or guides/wikis on getting set up?

link
confounded 2886 days ago
Answering my own question, suppliers of boards are available on the FSF's site (these are the boards which the FSF use themselves):

https://fsf.org/ryf

link
153791098c 2886 days ago
Yes that's a good starting point. And a great option if you have the money for it. This will also support the people that put in hard work to achieve and provide ultimate user freedom.

If you are on a tight budget however i recommend buying the motherboard on aliexpress (for about $200) and if you are not comfortable in flashing libreboot yourself you can ask a company that delivers bios chips for this motherboard to flash a custom bios and supply the libreboot rom binary to them. You can easily swap the bios chips yourself. The libreboot and coreboot websites have lists of hardware that are compatible (ram/cpu).

Also if you are interested in newer liberated hardware, look into the Talos II. They provide a proper workstation that comes with only free software. It will be more difficult to setup since it has a different cpu architecture, but it is definitely the way forward.

link