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by phh 2341 days ago
Uh, no? This is much more free-er than typical laptop, be it recent or old.

The vast majority of laptops have closed-source BIOS. The vast majority of laptops have components with closed-source firmware with access to RAM (Intel ME comes to mind), which includes BIOS (because it keeps running after boot).

Also, only modern laptops have IO-MMUs to prevent PCI-Express devices from accessing the RAM directly. (PinePhone simply doesn't use PCI-E)

And I don't think there is /any/ x86 laptop on which we know how to do DRAM initialization without closed-source blobs.

1 comments

> I don't think there is /any/ x86 laptop on which we know how to do DRAM initialization without closed-source blobs

Pre-SandyBridge 2009 era stuff?