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0 pointsbcantrill2y ago0 comments

Ironically, it was Dell's total inability to resolve a pathological rash of uncorrectable memory errors very much is part of the origin story of Oxide: this issue was very important to my employer (who was a galactic Dell customer) and as the issue endured and Dell escalated internally, it became increasingly clear that there was in fact no one at Dell who could help us -- Dell did not understand how their own systems work.

At Oxide, we have been deliberate at every step, designing from first principles whenever possible. (We -- unlike essentially everyone else -- did not simply iterate from a reference design.)

To make this concrete with respect to the CPU in particular, we have done our own lowest-level platform enablement software[0] -- we have no BIOS. No one -- not the hyperscalers, not the ODMs and certainly not Dell -- has done this, and even AMD didn't think we could pull it off. Why did we do it this way? Because all along our lodestar was that problem that Dell was useless to us on -- that we wanted to understand these systems from first principles, because we have felt that that is essential to deliver the product that we ourselves wanted to by.

There are plenty of valid criticisms of Oxide -- but that we don't understand our system simply isn't one of them.

[0] https://www.osfc.io/2022/talks/i-have-come-to-bury-the-bios-...

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4 comments · 2 top-level

mlindner2y ago· 2 in thread

As a side question, what's the name of your custom firmware that is the replacement of the AGESA bootloader? I tried searching on the oxide github page but couldn't find anything that seemed to fit that description.

bcantrillOP2y ago

(The AGESA bootloader -- or ABL -- is in the AMD PSP.) In terms of our replacement for AGESA: the PSP boots to our first instruction, which is the pico host bootloader, phbl[0]. phbl then loads the actual operating system[1], which performs platform enablement as part of booting. (This is pretty involved, but to give you a flavor, see, e.g. initialization of the DXIO engine.[2])

[0] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/phbl

[1] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/illumos-gate/tree/stlouis

[2] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/illumos-gate/blob/stlouis/u...

mlindner2y ago

Thanks, are the important oxide branches of illumos-gate repo (and any other cloned repos) defined anywhere? I definitely wouldn't have found that branch without you mentioning it here.

Always_Anon2y ago

Interesting enough I also ran into something somewhat related with Dell that they were not able to resolve so they ended up working in a replacement from another vendor.

Nonetheless, it is quite interesting what you've built, but as the end user I'm not quote convinced that it matters. Sure you can claim it reduces attack vectors and such but we'll still see Dells and IBMs in the most restricted and highest security postured sites in the world. Think DoD and such. Core/libreboot with RoT will get me through compliance the same.

The software management plane y'all built is the headlining feature IMHO, not so much what happens behind the scenes that the vast majority of the time will not have a fatal catastrophic upstream effect.

>There are plenty of valid criticisms of Oxide -- but that we don't understand our system simply isn't one of them.

That's not what I said. There's a line in the sand that you must cross when it comes to understanding the true nature of the componentry that you're using. At the end of the day, your AMD CPUs may be lying to you, to all of us, but we just don't know it yet.

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