Intel NUC - free software friendly?

Following links from the NUC page I linked to, I found this page, explaining that Intel WiFi products require proprietary firmware in the kernel: http://www.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/sb/CS-034398.htm

There's no price on the page I linked to. You'll have to search for a suitable reseller.

Thanks for clarifying.

AMD is not really any better than Intel in that department, and it's worse in the sense that their integrated GPUs don't work properly with Linux-libre (they require proprietary firmware blobs to function fully).

On 2015-03-18 06:07, name at domain wrote:
> Is there an AMD option? If intel is releasing Chips-Motherboards
> without vpro-txt, are there any safe ones from AMD? You're really
> saying the Snares comes without any botnet/backdoor technology (that
> you know of)? AMT for example. What about any of these (minus those
> mentioned)?
>
> [VPro TPM TXT VT AMD-V Flicker TEM TZones on-board ARM processor AMD
> SVM TEE AMT IDE-R Execute Disable Bit PTT Intel Secure key]
>
> I try to research this, but my search results return next to nothing,
> and what is returned seems intentionally confusing.
> Which of these are dangerous, and which not?
>
> Does anyone know of a list of motherboards without this stuf?

Please subscribe to the h-node mailing list, we need more people.

>What about any of these (minus those mentioned)?

>Does anyone know of a list of motherboards without this stuf?

Why are you interested in avoiding all of the items in list between “[” and “]”?. Several of those things are unrelated to computer user rights or their presence doesn't imply that the CPU won't respect them.

“Execute Disable Bit” is about memory management. When activated for a memory page, it prevents the CPU from executing code in that page. It's a security feature. It makes stack overflow bugs harder to exploit to achieve arbitrary code execution. “AMD-V” is an instruction set that gives hardware support for virtualization. ARM doesn't makes any CPU as far as I know, but instead it licenses the CPU designs to other companies, which in turn make the CPUs. Not all of those CPUs implement treacherous computing.

Your message may mislead some users into thinking that all of those technologies are incompatible with the user rights, which is not the case.

Our (ThinkPenguin) systems are without vPro and without "Trusted Execution Technology" (TXT). This is far from perfect though and there are more issues to avoid now than ever. In fact you can't avoid all the issues with a modern X86 system.

There are a lot of different problems with different components and its often not obvious to even those of us who do this for a living. I can't even begin to get into the details of it. However the jist of it is short of extensive testing and other steps there is a high chance you'll run into a problem somewhere. Even when I say XYZ works. Go buy that. It may not.

Sometimes a chip inside has changed to one that isn't supported, sometimes it has the right chip, but the device ID hasn't been added to the driver so the device doesn't initialize, sometimes a device has the right chip, but the device differs from some original reference design, and thus will never be supported, sometimes the device has some NAND on it with proprietary software, but other devices with the chip don't have this, and as such should be avoided, sometimes its not actually free software friendly, despite multiple people purporting it to work due to peoples misunderstanding of how things work (ie they run Ubuntu, then test with Trisquel, proprietary firmware was loaded by one OS, and temporarily works in the other), sometimes only half the product works (two chips one device), etc. Sometimes things are left out, are soldered down, or digital restrictions have been added since the original reports of X working.

Now as far as Intel NUC systems specifically are concerned they are not all alike. One of the current big issues we're seeing is Intel's begun (among many others) soldering down or otherwise integrating wifi chips dependent on proprietary software on the NUCs. Despite some initial pictures to the contrary on newer models the actual systems which are shipping are dependent on soldered down Intel wifi chips which can't be replaced. There may be other issues I'm not aware of as well depending on the specific Intel NUC system.

I also want to point out that you can build a system for less if your willing to compromise the quality of the components going into it. The problem for most people is it's really easy to pick up flaky components for a fraction of the price. For instance: the failure rate on many SSDs including the best SSD is undesirably high. If you want something remotely reliable you need to select the right higher end components. There are some other things you may need to do as well. Such as updating the BIOS for instance. I don't know about all Intel NUCs, but I can say some are really well supported. Others not so much.

Intel's got good easy-to-read documentation. I've not seen equivalent documentation on AMD chips. I'm not so sure it matters though. If your going to consider AMD I'd probably look elsewhere. AMD's graphics are dependent on non-free software which means your stuck on a 2D-only driver. You might be able to do NVIDIA, but with a LibreBoot BIOS it might not work, from what I've heard, at least one some boards, due to the lack of support for the (?) PCIE slot (?).

If your going to be stuck on a 2D driver I'd probably investigate ARM. Though that said it's not a great option just yet either. You'll still be stuck on 2D, but at least there are a few boards which are not dependent on a proprietary bootloader. The tricky part is the OS. You can run LibreCMC, but don't expect to be able to do much, yet. It's targeted at embedded devices (like routers) and still needs a lot of work for any desktop usage. Honestly I really think we need a build of Trisquel for ARM first. You could run a distribution without non-free software, but its not going to be an FSF endorsed distribution as such distributions are violating at least some of the high standards set out by FSF's distribution guidelines.

It's actually more scary than this. We don't know what any modern x86 computer is doing behind the scenes. All modern X86 systems are dependent on a proprietary BIOS-or proprietary bits. These bits are licensed from one of only a handful of companies who are contractually prevented from releasing the info needed for a free software friendly BIOS to be produced. While some use coreboot its not free software. There just using it as a payload for proprietary bits. And LibreBoot is only going to work on select older hardware from several generations back. There is no getting around this on X86.

Hopefully some of the work we're doing will help solve some of these issues. However it's going to take a combination of things to produce a seriously usable modern system. Right now there is not enough money flowing to those working on these issues. If we get past stage-1 (ie a plan) there is a huge stage-2 issue. Designing and manufacturing anything is expensive. It's going to take a massive fund-raiser to pull off a truly modern system. It's going to have to be a fund raiser like nothing we've ever seen within the free software community.

You already answered your question but that is exactly what I was going to chime in with. I've been running the Intel NUC D54250WYK(H) for several months now. It makes a nice little computer and runs Trisquel very well.

Most people won't see any difference in the price of our computers vs putting something together themselves if they're using high end components. The problem is perception and not being skilled at building computers. People tend to compare a low end configuration they can build themselves vs our high end configurations. High end components can cost significantly more and are really critical in many cases due to the high failure rates of low end SSD drives and ram.

If your getting to “double the price” scenarios you are usually misunderstanding how taxes work and are located outside the United States-or are in a country with some sort of trade barrier like Brazil. Our prices are definitely not that high. The computers are shown without tax so they are lower than that of an equivalent locally purchased computer in most cases. However on delivery the government will collect whatever the local tax is. Ultimately you'll pay about the same. In some cases it might cost a little more for shipping, but thats about all, and in my experience its well worth it. Faster shipping, reliable delivery, etc.

The Intel NUC will never have a free software BIOS. Intel's uncooperative on this front and its necessary for Intel to cooperate in order to get LibreBoot working on any of the Intel NUCs. Francis (LibreBoot's lead developer) has stated this much before- among others. Including the CoreBoot developers.

While I generally agree with the overall sentiment that Intel's the way to go your probably giving Intel too much credit on the NUCs. The NUCs have numerous problems which aren't immediately noticeable. Issues we never saw with prior Intel boards. While initial reviews are going to be good the long term issues include catastrophic failures and really annoying glitches. Check out the Intel support forums for details. You can solve some of these problems if you know what your doing and where to look. There are numerous updates although they appear not to work for everyone. I'm presuming thats because there are different revisions/models/etc.

Yes, that's what I meant by "built-in". Thanks for clarifying.