[coreboot] TALOS project short of funding goals - where to now?

Sam Kuper sam.kuper at uclmail.net
Thu Dec 15 09:08:14 CET 2016


On 14/12/2016, Timothy Pearson <tpearson at raptorengineering.com> wrote:
> Not everything can be created on a smart phone or tablet, and in
> point of fact, _most_ things cannot.
>
> I understand that many users or developers of small projects don't need
> powerful hardware, but please don't make the grave mistake of assuming
> that everything will continue as-is on the development side if said
> hardware is not available.

Timothy, thank you for your work to design and crowdfund TALOS. TALOS
is the first platform I have seen advertised that has:

- auditable schematics, firmware, and software;

- ECC;

- IOMMU and other features that might support the security features in
Qubes or similar;

- at least as much power (RAM, CPU speed, etc) as a typical mid-range laptop.

That is a very compelling combination of properties: auditability is
important for avoiding malicious corruption or disclosure of data; ECC
is important for avoiding accidental corruption of data (and perhaps
for foiling "rowhammer" attacks); IOMMU/virtualisation/etc are
important for allowing the user to benefit from "security by
isolation"; and the prospect of having enough power to run a few
moderately demanding desktop applications simultaneously, on top of
VMs, is crucial in order for the user to actually make use of all the
aforementioned properties in a practical way.

Wherever the TALOS project goes from here, I do hope we shall see a
computer with those properties available on the market soon, at an
affordable price. If it comes from Raptor, so much the better.

I wish you the best of luck for the remaining hours of the crowd-funder.



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