- Novena: A Laptop With No Secrets. How we built a laptop with nothing but open-sourced hardware and software
spectrum.ieee.org /consumer-electronics/portable-devices/novena-a-laptop-with-no-secrets
Selected highlights:
Has the computer become a black box, even to experienced electrical engineers? Will we be forever reliant upon large, opaque organizations to build them for us?
Firmware is basically software (such as drivers, kernels, and bootloaders), installed at the factory, that runs on "bare iron" -- the computer itself, not its operating system. It’s found not only on the main CPU in your laptop but also on about a dozen embedded controllers -- small, special-purpose processors that take care of such things as managing the battery, keeping your hard disk free of errors, and maintaining your Wi-Fi connection. Each of these processors runs a bit of firmware; sometimes the firmware can be updated or modified, typically for the purpose of fixing bugs or adding features. But such updates can also introduce bugs or security flaws, and if you haven’t got the ability to inspect the firmware, then you, the user, must depend utterly on the vendor to take care of security.