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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: October 3rd, 2021

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  • That’s fair, but come to think of it, the architecture of the CPU doesn’t really say anything about privacy. Someone can build an RISC-V chip but sneak in telemetry, or you can build yourself a x86_64 CPU and be 100% no telemetry. It’s about the manufacturer, not the architecture.

    I don’t think you can ever be 100% sure that the CPU you’re running on is telemetry-free unless you have those kick-ass X-ray machines and examine it yourself. Building your trust on top of something else you deem trustworthy though, is practical. Billions of people are running Intel/AMD off-the-shelf CPUs, and there are perhaps millions specialists in them, what is the chance that a backdoor remains hidden?

    The same goes for software. How do you know Linux kernel, OpenSSL, Wayland is trustworthy? Because many people use them, and it’s unlikely a backdoor is there. Think about the sheer amount of software the CPU runs. Don’t you think we shall have a greater concern there?

    Hopefully this calms your paranoia about hardware a bit.

















  • I mean, you can cross-compile to generate a Gentoo rootfs for the embedded system.

    I worked on embedded systems for audio devices. I of course endorsed Alpine as well, but with musl as the C library I got weird bugs of stuttering audio output.

    With Gentoo I get the option to build my entire system with musl as well, but I would rather have that bug not in my system. That’s what Gentoo offers: options.

    By “LFS”, I think you mean Buildroot, practically. Buildroot is also highly customisable, but Buildroot isn’t a distro. Like LFS, there is no way yo update a system, only rebuilding with latest packages. It also does not have flags for the whole system, so you’re on your own if you want to disable, say IPv6, in the whole system.