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by doesnotexist 908 days ago
In this instance, it appears the author's motivation was to facilitate a clean room reimplementation by "producing a natural-language specification for others to reimplement". In other instances security researchers might reverse firmware in order to find vulnerabilities. As the article states:

> One example motivating the production of open source firmware for the BCM5719 is that it's the only closed-source firmware blob found in the Talos II, a high-performance POWER9-based system otherwise wholly free of firmware blobs... Once this is delivered, it will be possible to use Raptor's POWER9 systems with purely 100% free, open source firmware. As far as I am aware, there is no other machine in the same performance class which can make such a claim.
2 comments
Palomides 908 days ago
>All Raptor systems shipped after May 10, 2021 use the open-source Ortega firmware for the BCM5719 device.

https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/BCM5719

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brendank310 908 days ago
My old team did some work in this area a few years ago. We got the Talos II BMC code to be binary reproducible, and had a go at automating David A. Wheeler's compiler diversification to stop compiler subversion. We checked the boxes we intended to, though never got enough funding to polish it up. It's probably broken now, but we did post a portion of our work on gitlab: https://gitlab.com/deepthirst.
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