[coreboot] Does the 62xx Series Opteron work *securely* without microcode?

[Elena ``of Valhalla'']

On 2017-01-27 at 12:26:56 -0600, Timothy Pearson wrote:
> Something to think about: have you tried developing modern software on
> that Core 2 Duo?  Are you OK with only having hardware that can consume
> software (libre or not) that was created (compiled) on more powerful,
> non-free systems?

Please, define "modern software".

I have a deep (mostly) irrational hostility towards (libre|open)office,
so i have never tried to compile it (and suspect it may be problematic,
but not only because of performance issues).

Other than that, I have an X200 as my main (only, mostly) working
computer, updated to the maximum 8GB or RAM (which btw I'm only able to
fill when running multiple virtual machines).
For my $DAY_JOB I'm mostly working on what I believe is quite a common
type of modern software: web applications written in an interpreted
language, and that works on such a machine with absolutely no issue.

Lately I've compiled a couple of QT programs written by other people,
and I don't remember waiting a significantly longer time than expected;
it compares with the time spent running a full testsuite on some of the
projects I'm working on, so I expect that I could work on developing
such software with no big stumbling block from my computer's
performances.
Out of curiosity I've just compiled one of the heaviest programs I'm
using, darktable, and that took 10 minutes *including downloading all of
the dependencies in a chroot* and compiling from scratch (I used the
package building tools, because I have them installed and configured,
instead of having to install a dev environment).

I haven't (cross-)compiled a full OS for a few years; back when I was
using openembedded and did it I was using an even more limited computer
and yes, it could take hours. Nowadays however I'm mostly using debian
and packages that somebody else have compiled, usually on ARM boards¹
that aren't exactly known for their raw computing power.

¹ Debian doesn't crosscompile their "other" architectures.

One thing that would probably be problematic is compiling something like
the android SDK: that's an issue for freedom, but that's not really
required to work on modern software *for the free-ish computer I'm
using*.  Also, IIRC it is something that already required something like
8-16 GB or RAM a few years ago, when this computer would have been
considered quite new, and would have come with 4GB RAM max.

-- 
Elena ``of Valhalla''