Still waiting for someone to make an x86 platform that just shoves uboot and/or a kernel/initramfs, plus a DTB, into SPI flash and just boots straight from that without needing any "firmware" at all.

Like how ~all ARM SoC boards boot.

@azonenberg That could be neat.

I remember this whole "linux booting linux" thing that made some noise *years* ago and I think it shared that idea, can't recall though.

Everything should just standardize on OpenFirmware :v

@azonenberg flat device trees aren't cute. Device trees are only flat when they are stressed.

Basically, the idea that you need a DTB to boot is wrong. The device tree needs to be provided by the firmware. We went through this with ACPI already, people replacing their broken tables on the command line, and it had not suddenly become a sensible strategy twenty-five years later.

@GyrosGeier it makes much more sense to have a data driven boot process and not have code running on the platform before the OS starts.

(Doing this right would of course require that things like RAM init be handled in silicon or by the kernel, which is a whole other can of worms where silicon vendors are concerned...)

Oof

> The tools we use in our daily lives outside of our devices have mostly stayed the same. While buttons on our cars might have moved around — and I’m not even getting into Tesla’s designs right now — we generally have a brake, an accelerator, a wheel, and a turn signal. Boarding an airplane has worked mostly the same way since I started flying, other than moving from physical tickets to digital ones. We’re not expected to work out “the new way to use a toilet” every few months because somebody decided we were finishing too quickly.

Makes me think - sending someone a letter in the mail hasn't changed basically at all since 1963 with the addition of the Zip code. And even if you leave that off, USPS generally gets the mail to the place anyways.

Like there's probably nobody alive who hasn't had the "send a letter" workflow for their entire lifetime of:
Buy a stamp
Put a stamp on the top right of the envelope
Write a person's name, street number, street name, city, and state
Put letter in mail

Bizarrely, my area growing up had "local long distance" to neighboring cities that used 1 + 7 digits. How/why? I have no idea.

@JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange @r343l@freeradical.zone

Yes! They weren't considered local calls so they were billed per minute. And since they weren't technically "long distance" we couldn't choose a different long distance provider for them. Pretty sure it was just a racket.

@0xF21D@infosec.exchange @JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange @r343l@freeradical.zone

This became a big deal once dial-up internet came to town and we didn't have a local number- only local long distance.

@0xF21D@infosec.exchange

Weird - by 2002 when I moved from an area where one area code covered a significant portion of our side of the state to a metropolis that had 3 different areas codes in the same city, it was still "local" to any of those 3, but only if you didn't dial 1. Telephone switching has always been a little weird I guess.

@julie @0xF21D

This is really cool!

Reminds me of this guy who (used to?) take custom orders years ago: evilgeniuslabs.org/macrochips

I still have one from him and use it every day haha