Purism's FSP Reverse Engineering Effort Might Be Stalled

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 11 May 2018 at 09:18 AM EDT. 39 Comments
HARDWARE
Purism has been working on reverse-engineering the Intel Firmware Support Package (FSP) module but it looks like that work may have taken a turn.

A Phoronix reader tipped us off this morning that the Intel FSP reverse-engineering information made public by Purism has now been retracted. The past several months Purism has been working on reverse-engineering the Intel FSP to free the system further to run on only open-source code rather than still having the Intel binary-only module paired with Coreboot. Their big focus this year has been on figuring out the actual silicon initialization code inside the FSP. Purism's Youness Alaoui was very close to finding out this information at the start of April and he wrote a lengthy blog post outlining his reverse-engineering work.

But as we were informed this morning by a sharp-eyed reader, that post has now been removed:
2018-04-23 update: after receiving a courtesy request from Intel’s Director of Software Infrastructure, we have decided to remove this post’s technical contents while we investigate our options.

That same individual also pointed out the repository where they had been working on their FSP code has also been taken offline. That's about all we know for now, but will update if/when we hear more.

Update: As a result of the publicity of our posting today, Purism has now posted the following:
2018-05-10 UPDATE: Intel politely asked Purism to remove this document which Intel believes may conflict with a licensing term. Since this post was informational only and has no impact on the future goals of Purism, we have complied. If you would like the repository link of the Intel FSP provided from Intel, please visit their publicly available code on the subject.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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