They said FOSS, not OSS. F means free as in freedom. As in you’re free to modify the software running on your phone at will and to your liking and Apple or some government can’t get in your way.. not even for the kids.
Processor microcode is closed source (Intel/AMD), including most of the BIOS code. You are having hard time to build your devices. Maybe we can see change in the future.
> coreboot is a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) found in most computers. coreboot performs a little bit of hardware initialization and then executes additional boot logic, called a payload.
Maybe it does not seem a reasonable price to you, but for people who don't know, the HiFive Unmatched [1] sells for 679$ [2].
This is the most powerful RISC-V platform you can buy today. It comes as a Mini-ITX board including 16Gb of DDR4 ram, 1Gbps ethernet, usb 3.2, PCI Express and NVMe.
Of course it is less powerful than an x64 machine at the same price point, but it should work reasonably well when paired with an SSD and a graphics card.
On another hand, I don't remember the last time I was interested in a CPU's frequency. In isolation it gives no insights about the performance of a CPU, not even single-threaded performance. Even with the exact specs I wouldn't know how to interpret them, and I doubt many people would.
Nowadays I just check the benchmarks of a CPU to have a rough idea of it's performance.
I’m not sure I understand how microcode is a problem here. Microcode isn’t an OS. I can compile for arm 8.3 and execute those instructions on apple silicon just fine. The kernel is the only thing that gets in the way, not the microcode…
I guess they mean the coprocessor stuff, ime and whatever the AMD one is called.
I mean this does forget the point that absolutely nothing is stopping anyone making a riscv processor which also has such features; we just have to take the manufacturer’s word that they don’t? Riscv isn’t the solution to any of these problems, but hopefully it’ll enable a few more ethical manufacturers to pop up who do make this stuff their core mission.
Personally I'm hugely in favour of phrasing it in terms of "Right to Repair". Most people don't know how to repair their car or John Deere tractor either: and that's where the experts come in who do it for you.
In this case, you or me might be the expert, who can provide solutions for other people such as an "installer" to do whatever.
I personally don't really have a problem with Apple's plan here by the way; I think the way they're doing it is actually quite balanced and reasonable. But other people should be free to make a different personal decision on this. What I would like is to modify some other aspects of my iPhone though, like some things on the keyboard that still bug me after several years.