oh good morning everyone and welcome to
the open source film a conference 2019
I'm Philip I'm the founder of the
conference so probably have seen me
before
yeah first of all I want to thank our
sponsors and especially the co-organizer
David Hendricks from Facebook and Chris
Carr from Google for helping us to
realize the conference in the Silicon
Valley because without them it wouldn't
haven't worked out so that's really good
thank you big applause for them so this
year is a special year because we have
the 20th anniversary of
coreboot and you would open source
VMware and so let me introduce you to
Ron Minich
giving giving the keynote and yeah enjoy
the conference have fun and probably can
shatter meat so have a nice day
no I guess I'm worried yeah yes if
anyone hears from organized crime don't
kill me but I am wired so this is talk I
wanted to give about the 20th
anniversary because 20 years goes faster
than you'd imagine and there's some
interesting perspective about this
project and I think part of it is this
it's not a project destined for success
in fact this project basically almost
died 10 years ago so that part is
interesting I've been accumulating bits
and pieces of slides and stuff starting
about six months ago found some stuff
that I'd forgotten about David just
reminded me some other stuff I'd
forgotten about like the you know almost
fake intern death we did at Los Alamos
but I didn't find that picture so we can
talk about that one later
I've left a lot of stuff out this is a
personal view this is not representative
of Los Alamos Andy or Google this is
just me talking about my memories and
what I found in that kind of thing so it
1999 I've been working on supercomputing
for over 10 years I've been doing
stirs on workstations and PCs for about
eight years and I moved to Los Alamos so
weirdly enough I realized that you
really can't see it but the person was
no gray hair is me and that kind of
tells you what this kind of work does to
you after twenty years and the deal is
you would open up a box and then you
would wire up your own network it was
all doing yourself back then and
supercomputing for clusters and the
thing that I began to realize after a
while is how much I hated the BIOS like
with a passion why was that well you
know it took forever to boot took five
minutes to boot it actually takes longer
now but back then five minutes was
really horrendous and and to update the
firmware on all 128 machines there's no
bugs in firmware but anyway when there
was a bug you had to carry a floppy
around and you had to have a cart with a
video device and a keyboard and that
hasn't changed much except now that
includes a mouse so that's kind of odd
and then if things went wrong one of the
things went wrong how did you fix it you
just had to yank the node out and move
the jumper to a recovery BIOS which had
no keyboard and mouse so you put the
floppy in and you're in a machine room
with all these fans and you had to
listen for the beeps because it ran
autoexec got that and you waited for the
beeps and with luck you could then
recover so this is really just
incredibly awful and it's kind of not
changed it's still incredibly awful and
the amazing thing too is you know what
was the what was the deal you netboot
with TFTP and we all knew the TFTP would
be dead by 2010 except right wrong so so
but the thing I realize is wait a minute
there's copious documentation at
developer.android.com a write which is
huge right it'll easily fit a kernel in
a quarter make no problem and you know
so I thought wait a minute we can we can
just we can just put Linux in there done
so we put Linux in flash and we we
started with something Stephon Ryanair
oh did cold-open bios and one of the
things I realized is well forgot to put
Linux in flash we're gonna have to have
Linux able to boot a Linux kernel and
when we went to supercomputing one year
with that idea this well-known
next person said no way will I ever make
into the kernel even if you do it is
horrible ideal it'll never make it in
the kernel you know it's true our
version didn't make it an eric Hendrix's
version didn't make it but eric
Biederman's version did make it so you
know you never know what's gonna make it
into kernel there are actually been a
fair number of these kernel boots kernel
implementations back at OU before I did
a paper about them if you want to look
it up and as usual the cleanest one was
the one in Playa ninth so some things
never change
hey here's my assumption I kept thinking
that this is so terrible that if we do
this we're gonna hand it off in a year
to companies like you know AMD and HP
and Dell cuz they're gonna realize this
is really cool booting in seconds is
cool we've just removed their entire
software burden because it's now there
they're all there Linux guys are their
firmware guys and yeah we were kind of
naive but if you look at every single
one of the top 500 supercomputers on the
top 500 list they all run software
written at Argonne National Labs called
MPI cleanroom was invented at Sandia the
monte carlo method used very widely in
supercomputing was invented at Los
Alamos so you really can look back at a
60-year history of the do e labs
contributing to the computing community
in ways that most people don't even know
anymore so it wasn't crazy to think
could we do this new improved bio sent
and we would hand it out and people who
pick it up
well we then notice to the BIOS it by by
year 1999 was a profit Center BIOS gave
you vendor lock-in BIOS gave you quote
unquote features to give to people you
know BIOS did lots of things that that
we didn't realize it was doing in terms
of the business model of selling servers
and that's for the end what really made
that not work after a year we're still
there in the x86 world and we're trying
to work our way up I think we're going
to maybe in the next year but we'll see
but there's an upside that I began to
realize after not too long the Corbin
source is kind of this library and
knowledge about how stuff works and a
lot of that knowledge was lost before we
started this project and a lot of it has
come back and actually been lost again
but that's another story you know and
whatever the day it really hit me full
force was DRAM setup anybody who's ever
written done the mode register set you
got a shift the bits left three bit
why do you have to shift the bits left
three bits it took me two months to
remember this because it was something
I'd known 20 years earlier believe it or
not doing firmware on a z80 okay because
three bits or two bits or whatever the
byte Lane select if I want to write in
address text to DRAM I got a shift at
left to make sure that's the address
that goes to DRAM I'd known this okay
I'd forgotten it and and so what I saw
happening people figuring things out and
realizing them in code and then that
code is sort of a permanent record
almost except for the times we drop a
platform of how things work I'll talk
about the fast user interface in a bit
how we learned where the best place to
put graphics startup is it's in source
but it's in coreboot not in a kernel
that was a surprise
SMP startup we did the first real SMP
startup it was free Linux and and really
implemented it we didn't really know how
to do that until James Hendricks did
that an interest this funny thing I did
a reverse engineering k7 memory MSRs
I went back far enough in a GUID tree
it's there at that hash and you know
it's kind of funny we had to do that we
we enumerated the space the four billion
MSR is overnight run one night to find
the hidden ones in the k7 and that's how
we got dere I'm working on the case
seven so there's just stuff in there we
actually had a ROM you later we had a
thing called the web.config this is
actual screen shop thank God for the
wayback machine because I couldn't find
any of this stuff our webpages are long
gone of course second lesson put your
webpages and get or you'll be sad but
you could do stuff like this right you
could say hey you know I've got a lead
tech so you know give me a config file
it gave you a config file for that thing
then you built Linux BIOS as it was
called at the time and then you know the
way you went well the problem there we
didn't realize is the vendors were
throwing little minor wiring changes
into these motherboards all the time so
if I got a lead tech win fast in March
and I got another one in July they were
wired differently some GPIO is moved and
the difference was buried in the BIOS so
this is kind of a nice idea that didn't
work out in the end because of the
variability in the hardware it was
something we didn't suspect so we were
in assembly for a while and again you
can actually find the original commit
and this is an extract from the way back
thing Jeff Garcia came by and made his
big contribution he said hey there's a
guy named just forgot his name sorry are
you on rydberg's right in front of me
he's written this kind of thing and see
that I think you could build on it would
be a better foundation because you'd
have less assembly codes so this is the
this is the announcement on the webpage
of the commit where we actually made the
cut to having about a dozen assembly
code instructions in the Reston sea so
that was a big jump and all through this
time it was sort of iterate burn iterate
burn see how far you get watch a dram
not work watch DRAM work watch i/o not
work watch i/o work and you know we hit
this wall and I talked about this last
year where we got stuck on PCI and it
turned out the problem was Linux and we
most recently discovered this about a
year and a half ago can't always
configure a nun configured PCI bus and
this still happens if you boot Linux and
you haven't run all the UEFI Dixie's
Linux occasionally will stumble over in
this case a HCI and not be able to turn
a HCI on so we have patches for that
it's an ongoing problem I think it'd be
neat policy for anyone in the Linux
community to just commit to always
booting Linux on something or other just
to see if you can really boot when
nothing else is turned turned Hardware
on but you know many biases many kernel
systems in 2000 the BIOS did the right
thing and if you didn't do what the
kernel expected well you get something
like this see the thing in red if one of
the four bases register base address
registers with zero that meant that
quote unquote do was disabled which in
this case of course means not enabled so
the old confusion between disabled and
not enabled crops up over and over and
over again common thing okay now in May
of 2000 the Park Service said a
controlled burn in bandolier National
Park that became an uncontrolled burn
and decided to go east not west and
tried to burn down the entire town a Los
Alamos including the area where the
plutonium was stored and I didn't get
stopped which is good they only lost
about 450 houses or so but meanwhile
Here I am if you look I
kind of said hey first login on the 440
TX then there's a month it didn't take a
month it took a couple days it's just
that that background there is kind of
what was happening in my town at the
time it was he was trying to burn down
so that was kind of funny when I looked
at the old you know the history and
thought oh okay
that's why it was a month but anyway it
would have been faster graphics graphics
was a continuing issue then and now so
and and this is kind of oh yeah well how
much time do I have left half an hour Oh
God
I'll move faster so so we had to go with
blobs in 2001 there was no choice David
did a lot of that work I worked on a -
we we had to get the 32 16-bit
trampoline from - kernel money
implemented PCI BIOS we grabbed the x86
emulator from x11 all that code has
changed right it's still the same thing
though we're stuck with blobs for
graphics even today so the blob argument
won't go away it just came back again in
the last few days but we you know I
don't like blobs I don't want to have
blobs but don't get down on people too
much because there are some blobs in the
image it's just going to happen
Ron see see we could not get hyper
transport working on the Opteron period
it was just too darn complex you know
and you needed hyper transfer it up
before you could really kind of
configure memories I mean you were
trying to do it in an assembly code it
was just really an impossible situation
we couldn't figure out how to make
caches Ram work so the story as it was
told to me from Linux networks for Eric
Biederman worked is he literally
vanished for a month nobody knew where
he was nobody knew what was happening
and he reappeared with 13 thousand lines
of actually pretty darn good C code that
implemented ROM CC so you know this is
kind of to my mind sort of genius at
work there right somebody goes way comes
back and he's got a C compiler that
always in lines and uses only the
register set as its memory ROM CC made
hypertransport possible so you know take
a look at that sometime it's actually a
very interesting piece of code
this is Ray Martinus or single-board
still using it I forget yeah so 15 years
of this C compiler and and you know sort
of there aren't a lot of people who
found a lot of bugs in ROM CC I just
think it's an amazing piece of work so a
net victory so four years in Milan old
committed six million dollars to build a
thousand node Linux cluster which we
called pink
we caught a pink cuz that was like the
maximal weight Oh in the wire management
because all the other cars were like
white and blue and red guess why we call
it pink so but it was ten team machine
which of the time was really big it
would have put us on a top ten of the
top 500 and you know so I was looking at
that and I noticed this thing at the
bottom booting Windows 2000 from a full
open-source code base so the first
Windows boot was in 2002 I'd forgotten
about that gotta love the wayback
machine but you know to get to get a
super computer commitment like that was
pretty amazing pink was the tenth EF
machine the dec alpha machine that was
also a tenth EF machine was a sixty
million dollar machine so that was kind
of an interesting comparison so this is
what it looked like back then to build a
supercomputer you know guys would show
up and they'd sit there and wire stuff
for like a week and then they spend time
finding the bed fire Arbor there weren't
many little mention here on the right is
Eric Hendrix he did to Colonel Monti he
did beep rock he did a lot of incredible
stuff and on the left is Greg Watson who
did the PowerPC port of Linux files so
this kind of weighted lateral from this
will never work this is a terrible idea
let's go spend some money on it and that
kind of is a good you know that happens
a lot a lot more than you realize and
and generally you know if people say it
can't work and you know it can work
that's a good sign that you should just
go ahead and do it for what it's worth
but you know then then we thought well
it's all about HGC that's all we did
right Linux BIOS has always conceived as
the base of a stack of software that
Tyson Sawyer wrote to us for my robot it
said yeah we used it in a pack but
because you know mine finding robots
that boot in seconds are better than
mine finding robots the Boonton minutes
can't argue the point right
and then Hamish Guthrie said I there's a
TV that's made in Turkey the digital TV
and TVs to boot in a second again you
know the rest of that punchline it was
also used in the military modem and then
robber Armstrong and Mitch Williams had
this neat idea which was to take a pile
of parts that look like that and
assemble it into that that thing was a
lot of fun you could kind of dropkick
that and it would work because there was
only one disc any any man at the disc
well but it took incredible amounts
abuse from airline baggage handlers and
every time we plugged it in and turned
it on and worked and we had it until
they reorganized the building at Sandia
and they put it in a box and it went
into the Indiana Jones warehouse we we
think it's still Sandia but nobody knows
where sandy it is so oh well
but that had started a lot of other good
ideas so that one on the right we called
EQ it was a CD case holding a bunch of
things and then you know that's a build
session of the top left at my house you
know so the mini clusters were really
cool and continued to be cool and I had
from there we got the R&D 100 award and
the funny part is that's a mini cluster
there the award was for the thousand of
machine but a lot of people would look
at that mini cluster and say how the
heck did you get a thousand servers in
that little box so you know I guess it's
the importance of labeling but the neat
thing was it was a thousand nodes one
disc they shipped it from Salt Lake City
to Los Alamos the disc failed the only
thing that broken the whole thing in
shipment was the disc and they said no
problem we've got to back up this they
took out the backup disc and it had
failed too so this is why I really
really hate discs but you know this is
part of a stack Linux BIOS is a part of
the stack but it wasn't really the thing
that made cluster Matic cluster Matic
you saw Eric Hendrix there he was kind
of the key guy on everything above the
of above Linux piles we even ran a class
this is kind of fun this is a class at
ut-austin and the deal was I don't know
IBM did this I doubt they do anymore
you call IBM and say can I have 24
ThinkPads for a loan for a couple days
at a conference then they've come in
those big blue boxes and you know it's
pretty awesome and then we we ran this
class and you can kind of see here
these are two little systems and in a
class people would build Linux files
burning on that and then boot our
cluster stack so he would actually build
like the thousand node cluster they
build a two node version that in a day
it was just kind of educating people on
how this software stack worked so caches
Ram I was a UNM one day and somebody
said talk to this grad student he's from
Intel he can tell you how to do caches
Ram you're not doing it right which we
already knew that because we couldnt get
it to work at all and he said oh caches
Ram is so easy you just start reading
the manual carefully enough and he said
look at the cache disabled bit and I
said yeah it turns off the cache she
said that's not what it does the cache
disabled bit does not disable the cache
the cache disabled bit disables kind of
going out to memory and I said if you
tell me this you're gonna get fired he
said no no that's ok I'm just reading
the volume carefully so so we got caches
for him but that's like the original
caches ran there's two papers I found
which are kind of fun and again it's
more knowledge realizing code and this
is where I don't think FSB should take
this over because then we lose that
knowledge and I don't like to lose
knowledge so that's kind of my one
disagreement there on FSB and this is
the first Linux file summit we had about
a hundred people I have no pictures
didn't go that far the reason I
mentioned a hundred people because well
let me digress two One Laptop Per child
and see if anyone recognizes that person
in that picture so this is my room at
home and we were trying hard to figure
out how the hell to make that geo
chipset work and I can tell you stories
there was a recent Ollie Lowe quit the
Linux files project and that chip said
is it but thanks to Steve Goodrich who
flew down at Mark Jones in Jordan Krauss
you know we were able to get it working
I also ought to mentioned they
eventually moved to open firmware they
moved to open firmware because open
farmer had a command prompt that was
active before DRAM training and nobody
could get DRM training right so it's
just how to keep in mind we don't do
command prompts that's been kind of our
mantra but every once in a while maybe
you should so now notice I said a
hundred people in Santa Fe and Homburg
and oh six
the bloom is off the Rose here so where
there's like a dozen people there and
jimmying a you're in that picture
somewhere you might see yourself Jimmy
and came and gave it talk about it Jesus
and then this is when we started the
hack sessions we were in his hotel lobby
till like 2:00 a.m. we would close the
bar and drink beer and pull out
soldering irons and then one night one
of the hotel police came out and yelled
at us for not renting a meeting room
almost threw us out but that's a pretty
elegant place to have a hack session
right you can see the painting in the
back so it's pretty cool and this is
where the see neat tech activity began
so this is also where taking pictures of
crashed firmware began that's a phone we
found on the street in Hamburg but this
is miniatur wunderland and there's
something we saw in Bochum top left is
Peter shoe this car stereo that is the
only video I have on youtube that people
still ask to see we made a video of his
car stereo playing a song and people
just loved that car stereo because it's
sitting in a cardboard box and this is
the last Linux BIOS snapshot I have so
at some point in o8 name change because
true story both Microsoft and son came
to me and said we want to use it you got
to get Linux out of the name we can't
look at it with Linux in the name take
Linux out and we'll take a good hard
look at using it and they did and they
didn't use it so well I say you know we
had our dreams but it didn't quite work
out but you know the thing is at this
point it wasn't Linux because the
remember that big flash part it was way
too small and it wasn't a BIOS
deliberately right we didn't want to
implement a BIOS so at it went damn
burrow 8 remember I said there was only
like a dozen people in Oh 6 this is half
the people who came to the o 8 meeting
we really you know we were on it we were
clear on a downward slope I'll get to
that in a minute we did get a little
talk from word about the FSF you and
some of you might recognize Stephan in
there and a guy on the left on the left
picture is Jourdan Krause who really was
incredibly helpful and supportive until
you went on to other things
2009 is cake and fig so Patrick and
Stefan I met in Hamburg along with this
5,000 person harley-davidson convention
so you're kind of sitting in a coffee
shop and these things are roar
by in circles as you can't take a Harley
too far before it breaks I think so so
it's just kind of rolling around rolling
around and roll around and then we're in
a coffee shop one day and we realized
they pointed all the speakers at us to
chase us away because they didn't like
our soldering iron or something so we
actually would like move a coffee shop
twice a day so we wouldn't get chased
out the coffee the cake config was this
huge improvement in our life but weird
thing one odium complained to us
recently that it's too hard to use so I
don't know what can I say
I think it's fine but we do get that so
kind of the end of the beginning was O 3
because the end of O 3 until let us know
that developer didn't talk comm wasn't
going to really have any information on
how to configure quick paths which meant
we were done in server and then things
kind of went down and then you know 2010
was kind of our near death experience
and we came back so 2009 this is a
retirement party we had four IDI or
cluster that was alphas and uh you know
it kind of went out and nobody was
really pushing on PowerPC so that kind
of went out so we ended up being an
optional x86 miles and you know that was
unfortunate because some endian isms and
they x86 isms did begin to creep in you
can see them but more at a point we were
tied to a chipset world that was closing
right so we locked ourselves in a room
and the doors were all closing on us and
you know Andy was with us for a little
longer but you know at this point Intel
is basically out of there and so I this
was an interesting chart I took all the
get commits and just did a histogram by
deer and you know this is kind of in my
opinion again this is my personal view
that's where Tue started to fall out you
know I mentioned that six million dollar
machine
there was a clone of that there was more
expensive installed here in California
people Indy we wanted Linux by us they
kept getting told they couldn't have it
and then you know in 2010 a bunch of us
took a break I mean I think now Stefan
may correct me but my memory is when he
went to Google his thought was he was
done with coreboot for a long time so
you know but then you see in 2011
Chromebooks kind of come back in so my
opinion this chart makes sense with
those notes I added you know HTC and
Google we're done Linux Networks went
under all the IOT like things that had
been in
and I use x86 things were now armed
things we need to arm so the you know
kind of the the usage was not there
anymore guys like Peter Stuka kept the
lights on but you really can see in that
chart pretty dramatic evidence that
interest had dropped a lot so again this
is my memory stuff I'm telling you those
stories walking down a hallway in
somebody system hey you're the coreboot
guy aren't you and he says yeah and he
says can you get this working on a
Chromebook in like six months
and uh you know he pulled it off and so
so in 2012 all the x86 Chromebooks that
came out from then and afterward
coreboot and then in 2013 when multi
architect Shane multi architecture came
back with the arm you know and from that
point on things things just kind of took
off and we did some other development so
I did this thing called the fast user
interface here's the deal on a
Chromebook in developer mode it runs the
the VGA BIOS to get graphics up in
normal mode Linux Springs graphics up
and it bothered me that there is two
different paths for bringing graphics up
so I mucked about with Koch and Ellie
for a while and then Simon helped me out
with the kernel side and infer cron made
the whole thing you know legible code
and then we'll finally we had we had a
you know startup in core boot and the
surprise was my thinking was the fastest
graphics startup will be Linux second
fastest coreboot slowest to be the VGA
BIOS I was completely wrong the surprise
was the fastest startup was always in
core booth so we did this little movie
and I'm gonna let you see take the guess
which one is the core booth based
graphics in source oh no
well you get the point
so what on the right is the core boot
one and it's interesting that didn't
work well at all I guess it was loading
and actually on some Chromebooks the
core booed based graphics code open
source was five seconds faster than than
doing the graphics start than a kernel
so that was a result I did not expect
then it got to be 2014 and Peter Stuka
wired me up this thing that's a 16 mega
it went into a kg PE D 16 and here's the
funny part
I had Linux and I had this thing called
you root was his user mode user land and
go I've been running Hakeem you for a
year or so at that point we dropped that
unchanged thing into its a connector we
dropped that thing unchanged in - uh-huh
sorry trying to fix the graphics hey we
dropped that thing completely unchanged
into the hardware and it worked first
time I wanted to see how it would fail
but it was kind of a view of the power
of you know using Linux is your firmware
that just worked and it was the same
image later I used in a minnow and in a
server right literally the same image
and it just worked so when you when you
use Linux this firmware a lot of effort
just disappears from your life because
there's no such thing as a forward port
just about and you know so so it prog
embedded Linux conference I was there
with a company called horizon and we had
a Facebook node they're running Linux
boot and a sinus that kicked me and you
know we used to use the kick me sign at
supercomputing because the idea is just
come up and hit reset on the node and
watch it boot real fast
and that's when I realized that the kick
me sign did not translate to many other
cultures nobody knew what the hell we
were talking about right
it's like something's that kick me what
do you want me to kick I don't
understand so so I had to stand there
and say push reset and watch it real
fast
number here that thing running UEFI over
eight minutes that thing running Linux
boot 20 seconds so you know in fact that
thing booted net booted over 100 megabit
Ethernet from an ARP I so fast
that we thought we had a bug for awhile
we didn't realize that it was booting so
fast we hadn't seen the net boot happen
so you know it and I never get tired of
fastboot because I don't see it that
often but that was a really nice example
of why it's good and then finally this
is from the Facebook page this is the
part I really like
those three words coreboot you routed
Linux boot right so Arista right kind of
big switch company and it's not well
known but a wrister I actually ran Linux
files from the stork and then had moved
to coreboot of course they moved to this
totally open source thing working with
Facebook so thank you Facebook but
there's also a new direction this year
there's a project that we started called
or boot or boots written and rust or
boot is coreboot without see you know
see he's been a good friend of ours for
50 years it's time to give it a little
retirement but we like the Corbett
directory layout tools and assembly
there's a lot of good stuff in coreboot
to like so basically what we do is we
forked coreboot remove to anything that
looks like a thot hoc and took it from
there talk to Ryan O'Leary Oregon Sean
or prachi here they're working on it and
we were really delighted with rust
now it's supposed to say two days but
I've got a typo in two days Ryan and I
got the arm v7 like EMU working you'll
see his talk here in the next day or two
and then you know a few weeks and sigh
five high five U is up and working and
we're loading a kernel I think so
so here's the part I really wanted to
get to what do we learned because it's a
20-year project and I have personal
views about what we learned and I think
what's interesting is we almost died
right so we had this great early success
you can go to Linux Journal in 2004 it
was amazed there are probably five
server vendors in there that said they
work with Linux files they were all lion
but they said they work with Linux files
so at least they cared but you know but
so we had that success and after that it
kind of really went down for a while and
and we had really great people in terms
of the true believers but you got to
have companies and we didn't have the
companies so we almost died and then
Chrome OS at least in my view brought us
back so I think sustainable projects
encourage leadership transition I was
the BD FL for for about four years and I
was ready to be done
luckily Stefan stepped up in O six we
had a lot of interesting days there you
got to tolerate different ways different
cultures
press themselves but if you have toxic
people get rid of them as soon as you
can or at least moderate them you've got
to be very very careful I've seen one
community completely destroyed by three
or four bad actors I think the risk five
mailing-list are having a little trouble
now because they just don't want to do
what they got to do emails horrible
horrible horrible medium the reason
there are best-selling authors is
because none of us know how to write I
mean I'll save speak for me anyway so
you really want to get in touch with
people in person when you're having a
problem because I'll you know email
sucks so relation control not a lot of
people know what we started out as CBS
probably no one here remembers what that
is on SourceForge we took this weird
detour through arc which is now called
bizarre which is the right name then we
moved the SVN for a couple of years that
did well but it was really clear at some
point that get was the way to go and
that happened around 2010 I think
Patrick's one who did that but the cool
thing that Stefan did I still don't know
how he did it is he kind of got the
revision history all the way back almost
to the beginning so you can check out
version 1 and look around I had a lot of
fun doing that you know when I was
trying to get this talk together you can
still find people in Google who will
tell you how horrible git is and why our
internal repo system is far better don't
think that cuz we usually get this
question has been resolved it hasn't
build systems all the bad stuff was my
fault we started out with his BST like
build system because I like the BSD
build system then we had this Python
tool and it just got awful and Patrick
and a lot of it is Patrick but you know
really helped no build system is forever
we have build systems and all the
arguments all the time where I work the
one thing I warn you against the thing I
see all the time is this build system is
really complicated let's go to a more
complicated one to make it easier to
understand never seen at work okay so
you know I'm a big fan at the moment of
cargo which is the rust thing but it is
pretty complicated so I don't really
know the answer code perfection is the
enemy of the good
every project struggles with this you
were just struggling with it today what
do you when you take code that really
isn't written the way you'd like to see
it written but you don't have time to
fix it and you kind of need
this is really a really hard problem I'm
beginning to think we need to like if
someone really slams a piece of code
maybe you should ask them to take
responsibility for helping you know
improve it I'm not quite sure what the
answer is I just know that it's a
problem in in in every project you need
to encourage experiment you need to
encourage things you think are stupid
but on the other hand nobody gets to
break the tree so just something to
think about
we also learn we don't always learn so
we had the coreboot ports the risk 5 in
14 15 16 17 18 and 19 where's Phillip oh
yeah and Sam Hal in 2019 we got the BIOS
again so there's this model called SPI
soup supervisor binary interface and the
idea is you're running in kernel mode
and you put a number in a register and
then you do something you trap to a
different protection mode and you do a
full save of all the context and then
you do something you need for the answer
and a register in your return right
plastic BIOS model nothing new there
it's 1979 all over again well guess what
doing a TLB flush that way is really
horribly slow and impacts your
performance negatively in your Linux
kernel so this is kind of a discouraging
thing to see happen because we spend
five years talking to the people in that
community about why this was going to
suck and we kind of look this is why we
lost Jonathan Noyes Scheffer right he
finally just decided he was sort of done
with you know runtime firmware and n
mode so orbit is gonna take a very
different approach come talk to us about
it how we're gonna do it but as of now
we're going to run kernel and M mode
that's gonna be interesting I think but
here's the thing we already learned open
source wins right so back in the day in
like 1999 I had of this thing oh yeah
but open source always wins and I really
began to doubt that by 2009 I was really
concerned that in spite of everything
everybody had done these sort of IP
walls that had been set up we're gonna
we're gonna kill us right and yes there
are blobs
I've got no err no I'm not gonna claim
there aren't blobs but if you really
really really look at sort of the number
of blobs they're declining over time we
do have new systems like Chris 5 where
we can avoid blobs entirely so
or later it you know I don't care how
big your company is or how smart your
company is you're not as smart as the
rest of the planet so this is kind of
the core argument about why open-source
wins and with that I'll stop because I
owe and I wanted to thank the following
wonderful companies for supporting us
but I did want to leave room for some
questions and so that's my 20-year
history leaving lots of details out so
yeah an environment doesn't suck so so
that I never have been happy with the
power management on the lakes on the
Linux laptops and I really don't like
the fact that I'm using the Mac but I
and for years I just only used
Chromebooks because I thought they were
great until I could no longer plug more
memory and disk into them but yeah I
would like to get onto something that is
running I actually like to get on
something run or boot to be honest but
yeah Corbeau to be ok - yes not gonna
happen for a long time but yeah well
actually so if you watch if you watch
the number of people creating your wrist
5 silicon it's actually exploding so I
shouldn't say that it could happen very
very quickly in the next year or two
I've been amazed any other questions Wow
alright well the one thing David
reminding me of if we kind of staged an
intern death and it was pretty good
picture so go find him and the other
thing I forgot to mention he was
supposed to yell it out one of the fun
parts of the geode port for OLPC there
actually we found a register called
bizarro and it's kind of hard to
describe how painful that ships that was
but maybe that is a hint it was really
amazing how hard to little chips can be
to configure and bring up but oh hello
came in one
day and said I've been dreaming MSRs in
hex and he said this is my last port so
if that's it then I'm done no other
questions okay thanks
[Applause]
[Music]