Just an offer. Please direct me to yours… And I’ll direct others I’ve talked to 
I’d harp on your about your tone if I didn’t already realize paranoia is a valid motivation for the improvement of computer security 
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I’ve wanted mod on this forum for years, really only ever said anything in public once (it was apparently a buzz at the time), and I try to keep thta perspective strong in my threads ta the very least.
Diff acct, same user tho.
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“If we’re starting a group I’ll start the group. I made the thread.” → Please do direct me to it once you start it. I was thinking Telegram would be best/easiest, but if there’s already a forum for it, then that’s probably most robust.
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You could always have the discussion in here?
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Could start a thread for it; sure. No idea if reverse engineering could bring this forum heat & speedy deletion, though.
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Absolutely it would.
I wouldn’t distribute chips, however info is open.
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I am not sure if this is the official announcement, but since at least 2021-05-10, Raptor’s Talos II and Blackbird machines are shipping with the clean-room-reimplemented Project Ortega opensource firmware for the on-board Broadcom NIC.
https://git.raptorcs.com/git/bcm5719-ortega/
So unless you specifically order a Talos II board with the optional SAS controller, there is no proprietary firmware being used on the mainboard at all.
Peripherals like a keyboard, display, or mouse could have their own internal firmware, as likely would a hard drive or SSD; so the resulting machine is bound to have proprietary code on an microcontroller somewhere, but this is, as far as I can imagine, as open-source as modern machine can get.
Most typical users would also add a mouse and proper GPU as well; while I can imagine mice, keyboards, or displays designed to work without firmware, an Nvidia or AMD/Radeon (or Intel?) GPU will be using proprietary GPU firmware, though AMD (and Intel?) PCIe cards can use open-source GPU drivers.
Technically, you might be able to get Nouveau working for some basic functionality on Nvidia cards, but I have not heard much about anyone using Nouveau outside of x86 machines.
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Concept upon my return:. Instead of just power and ppc, lets make this the alhernate architecture hux.
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Learning computer architecture design at uni right now so I might be of assistance 
Just got my latest assignment:
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Ah. Computer Architecture and Computer Design. I remember those days. Are you required to implement this is software or can this be in hardware as well? Our architecture class was software and our design class was hardware.
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The project is in VHDL which will be deployed to an FPGA. Probably not too hard to convert that to real hardware though.
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Has anyone managed to get access to the free POWER8 and POWER9 cloud service provided by Brazilian university Unicamp?
I’ve requested access but I don’t have an app to port or test so I’m not counting on that.
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Thats super cool! I didn’t know brazil was in 1987 still.
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Recent version of Firefox, recent version of OSX, recent versions of POWER…
What is of 1987 here?
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Yeah I wonder about that.
Anyway I got access!
Account lasts for 30 days and the resources they offer for free are really generous!
Image selection is pretty good. Many recent distributions. Sadly FreeBSD didn’t booted into multiuser mode.
This scratches so many of my geeky itches…
I’ll try to install some crap. Will post if I find it interesting.
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Cryptsetup benchmark results:
So I’ve installed x2goserver and xubuntu-desktop to run a remote X11 session.
Firefox installs just fine.
I thought chromium-bsu was a version of the browser but its some kind of game. Of course on such a remote session over SSH it ran like crap.
Some stuff is not available. One thing that got me curious is how well wine performs under another ISA. M1 doesn’t count since it can emulate x86.
Installing Rust and Go. Going to check if most tools I’m familiar with compile and work the same.
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It might be interesting to test how well Minecraft’s server runs on POWER8 when compared to x86.
Trung Le on YouTube has tested a wide variety of programs on POWER9, but many of those are GUI programs that will probably, like Chromium BSU, not function well on a headless server.
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The only issue is how to connect to it. I’m not sure if inbound connections other than SSH are permitted. They offer a really roundabout way to connect to the instance through SSH to a main host.
So my guess is that the Minecraft client would have to connect through an SSH tunnel.
Outbound connections runs just fine.
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Hmm. Can you explain in more detail?
Assuming there is no prohibition in the usage agreement, maybe a quick portscan would be enlightening?
While I could understand a fear of abuse, only giving users one month of access seems likely to deter most miscreants, except maybe email scammers, but again, server software is a large part of what POWER is used for. What if you want to experiment with a stack of email software? For example, I think I remember hearing that Kolab’s open source email service product was run on POWER8.
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TOS is very broad. Basically: don’t do stupid shit or we will terminate your account.
You don’t have a public IP. Instead they map an SSH forward to a port based on the last octets of your instance IP address, which is a private one. So if your vm ip is 10.8.59.254 you need to connect to minicloud.parqtec.unicamp.br port 59254.
Instructions here (also how to get access - they’ve granted me access in the same day).
I think maybe its possible run the Minecraft server on port 22/TCP to make use of this forwarding rule and manage the server from the console web app.
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