While we all want blob-free hardware like the Talos Power9
... which is 100% blobless. Or the Cavium MIPS64 chips (100% blobless). Or if you want Arm64, the Rockchip RK3399 (100% blobless). You have plenty of choices.
One mitigation is to keep the device offline.
Here's an even better mitigation: don't buy junk like this chip.
Stop blobwashing junk hardware like this with deceptive misrepresentations.
I looked into running OpenBSD on ER3-Lite and was told that network routing performance was poor without a binary blob that ships in Ubiquiti router firmware. Cavium is owned by Marvell.
> if you want Arm64, the Rockchip RK3399 (100% blobless). You have plenty of choices.
The challenge is finding existing products that people can buy at retail. We're having this conversation in an HN thread about ECC. The only off-the-shelf Arm NAS (4xSATA, 2xM.2) that I've found with ECC + Debian is the QNAP above.
I will look for an RK3399 SBC that supports ECC memory, 4xSATA and at least one NVME slot, which could be installed into a 1U NAS chassis.
> Stop blobwashing junk hardware like this with deceptive misrepresentations.
ECC is a high priority requirement for an Arm NAS. Would be delighted to find a blobless Arm SBC with ECC support and enough I/O channels for use in a NAS. Otherise, ECC trumps blobs for an offline NAS use case in a 1U chassis, which can be physically secured in a rack against physical tampering.
... which is 100% blobless. Or the Cavium MIPS64 chips (100% blobless). Or if you want Arm64, the Rockchip RK3399 (100% blobless). You have plenty of choices.
One mitigation is to keep the device offline.
Here's an even better mitigation: don't buy junk like this chip.
Stop blobwashing junk hardware like this with deceptive misrepresentations.