The POWER of open

We would like to be able to trust our software when we run it — that's one reason why we're free software enthusiasts — but without the ability to trust the hardware we run it on, no amount of openness and security in our software can save us. Georg Greve, one-time president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, spent nearly an hour talking about "How Open POWER is changing the game and why the Free Software Community should care". It was a talk that was in many ways an old-time pep rally rather than a technical presentation.

Greve founded the FSFE and steered it for nearly nine years. He's been honored by the German government for services to free software and open standards. But his current daytime job is CEO of Kolab which, while it is an excellent project, is very much a software one. So why, he asked, did he choose to dedicate his time on-stage at FOSDEM to talking about hardware?

We need hardware to run our software on. If we want control over our software, we had better have trust in that underlying hardware. There are two routes to that trust; one is faith-based, and the other is through verifiability. At the moment, the CPUs at the heart of the desktop and server equipment that most of us run our free software on are generally made by Intel, and its track record for both justifiable good faith and verifiable openness is not all that good, he said.

Greve pointed out that every modern Intel x86-type processor contains a second, internal CPU that you cannot audit, but that can take over your machine. That means you can't tell what the people who made your hardware, or the governments to whom those people are beholden, are asking your hardware to do; some recent events give cause for nervousness about what that might be. Greve paused before noting that Kolab is deliberately a European enterprise: "Snowden made us nervous. The recent election confirmed our concerns."

Even worse than what the makers of the hardware might ask it to do is what black hats might ask of it. Sooner or later someone will discover a vulnerability in the management CPU; imagine a rootkit that you cannot keep out, cannot detect, and cannot remove. No, we need a platform that gives us openness, control, and the ability to build our own, he said.

An audience member asked whether early Intel processors might now be clear of patent protection, and therefore eligible for being used as a basis for such a project. Greve replied that he was fairly sure you could lawfully build an 80286, but why would you? The important issue isn't merely open hardware, it's open, cutting-edge hardware.

Fortunately, IBM decided it felt the same way. It took its Power architecture CPUs (yes, the chips formerly used in Apple Macs and many other systems) and gave the architecture in its entirety to the OpenPOWER Foundation. Members of the foundation are allowed to customize OpenPOWER CPUs in order to create products that meet their needs. There's a definite focus on the data-center end of things; OpenPOWER is clearly aimed at people who have big computing needs. It remains focused right down to the sales end: there are companies shipping products based on these CPUs right now.

A question from the audience noted that the individual and academic memberships are non-voting (more precisely, a single board member represents all the "associate and academic" members, no matter how many there may be). The higher and more expensive tiers of membership get board seats based on the number of members. Greve conceded the point, but it was clear that he hoped the foundation would evolve in increasing openness through community participation and that, in any case, there aren't all that many alternatives.

Greve sees OpenPOWER as part of a sea change in mindset. There is an increasing awareness that products based on the old "trust us" mantra are becoming decreasingly attractive in a world that has realized that governments will get their fingers in wherever they can. He drew attention to the OpenCAPI consortium, which is trying to develop a new, open, high-performance bus architecture. One of its major players is AMD: "organizations that have not traditionally shared our core values are suddenly coming on board". We of the free-software community have a lot to offer: we already know about collaborating, sharing, and engaging. Since big players are suddenly listening to words such as these, we've been handed a real opportunity to shape the discussion and its trajectory, he said.

He did briefly mention the TALOS workstation, a Kickstarter project to produce Power-based open machines; he accepted that it had crashed and burned but he wasn't interested in examining the failure in too much depth. He noted that such a device would be quite valuable and hoped that development might restart. Meanwhile, effort right now was better spent in engaging with OpenPOWER; we should build for it, break it, and reassemble it, he said. He offered to get audience members OpenPOWER hardware if they were serious about working with the platform. He also asked them to help spread the word: "When IBM tries to communicate something, it ends up being a well-kept secret. They are horrible communicators."

Anyone with tendrils into the European Parliament was urged to try to raise awareness of the issue. Airbus was the European reaction to US dominance of the airframe industry, which is an industry that was deemed critical enough that Europe needed its own dog in the race; Greve can't see why computer hardware is any way less important. He noted that China is already building its own customized OpenPOWER chips; it removed the US cryptographic elements, which weren't trusted, and replaced them with its own. Why, he asked, isn't Europe doing exactly the same thing?

For all that this was a more of an old-time political rally than a technical talk, and even if you don't rush to line up behind his banner, it's difficult not to concede that Greve has something of a point.

[Thanks to the Linux Foundation, LWN's travel sponsor, for making this article possible.]