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  • Abdelkader Boudihseuros@bsd.cafe
    Jul 23, 2026, 9:22 AM

    One year ago, AWS deleted my 10-year account over a disputed $100 bill. That day I learned something uncomfortable: unless you are a customer capable of causing a PR disaster, your monthly bill doesn’t buy much leverage.

    That same week I noticed something else.

    Vendor lock-in isnt just a cloud problem. Its a hardware problem too.

    Here in Tangier (Morocco), there are warehouses filled with computers that Europe has already written off. Machines with 2-8 GB of RAM and 64-256 GB SSDs, sold by the pallet for almost nothing after being discarded by companies upgrading their fleets.

    The hardware wasnt broken. The software had simply moved on.

    The OS kept nagging users to upgrade, only to tell them afterward that their computer was too old to run the upgrade.

    That is software gaslighting hardware into becoming e-waste. LOL.

    So I started buying them.

    In the past months I have bought over 5,000 discarded computers, not to build a datacenter, but to understand them, resurrect them, and eventually donate many of them.

    That project became ChaosBSD.

    In just six months, ChaosBSD has landed 87 upstream commits (it is not a AI number, lol). Ironically, after I started buying old hardware, the prices of SSDs and RAM even DDR2 went through the roof. 😄

    Drivers are unlike almost every other subsystem. Frameworks get rewritten. Filesystems get replaced. APIs evolve. But silicon doesn’t get updates. A driver is either correct, incomplete, or it never gets merged. Once it is upstream, it often stays there for decades. I updated drivers that were not touched for 24 years.

    Losing my AWS account taught me not to trust a single cloud provider.

    ChaosBSD was my answer to the same problem in hardware.

    The project was never just about my machines. The drivers went upstream, so every FreeBSD user benefits from them.

    If you have an Intel Apple computer, you can install FreeBSD 16 or DragonFlyBSD on it. The computer will feel snappier than it original OS.

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Replies

  • Abdelkader Boudihseuros@bsd.cafe
    Jul 23, 2026, 9:40 AM

    Now let me tell you about the 87th commit.

    It was about FireWire.

    github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src

    Most people think FireWire died when USB became famous. It didnt.

    Its still used by professional audio interfaces, DV camcorders, industrial and scientific cameras, and plenty of legacy equipment that continues to do its job every day. Audio equipment don't need upgrades if they are still operating correctly. A firewire cable is superior to a new USB cable.

    That where i tested it. The users just kept using old version of MacOS that don't even have updated SSH.

    Together with Adrian Chadd, we dusted off the stack, rediscovered how it worked, cleaned it up, and refactored years of accumulated code.

    And we didnt stop there.

    We also added three new drivers:

    • fwcam - Firewire webcams
    • fwisound - Apple FireWire audio interfaces.
    • fwdv - DV camcorders, including many classic Sony, Canon, Panasonic, and JVC models.

    That means #FreeBSD can now talk directly to equipment that many operating systems have quietly abandoned.

    Someone in reddit used it to dump 50 tapes of childhood to digital format. I used it to have a zoom call with FreeBSD wifi group. :)

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  • David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
    Jul 23, 2026, 1:29 PM

    @seuros Sadly, my iSight died a while ago, but it was a great camera for its day. We actually did a load of filming with it.

    We had a DV camcorder, but it really needed an external microphone because otherwise the tape motor was loud and we needed to rerecord all of the sound after using it. It took 10 GB DV tapes and could dump them with Firewire isochronous transfer (the tape couldn't slow down, the computer either took the data or dropped it. USB prior to 2.0 didn't let you even guarantee it would reach the computer).

    But we moved to using the iSight because it let us record directly to the Mac's hard disk. A laptop on a trolley (with the iSight on its lid) gave us a stable camera platform that we could move around easily and no tape noise.

    As a result, I have a small pile of DV tapes that are still in their original packaging that I never opened.

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  • Cassandrichdalias@hachyderm.io
    Jul 23, 2026, 1:44 PM

    @seuros My impression of FireWire was always that it was inherently insecure and gave the device a backdoor to the host. Was this inaccurate or later fixed or is it just something you have to accept using that ecosystem?

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  • Abdelkader Boudihseuros@bsd.cafe
    Jul 23, 2026, 1:59 PM

    @dalias FireWire has direct DMA access to the host’s memory (up to the 4 GB address space on most implementations), which is why it earned that reputation. In many ways, it became the scapegoat.

    You know what else has DMA? PCI Express. Every GPU, NVMe SSD, NIC, and Thunderbolt device.

    The real issue was that, at the time, IOMMUs either didnt exist or werent widely deployed or enabled.

    The driver will use the IOMMU after few round of refactoring. My priority was to get the driver correct and working on real hardware first. And get it out the deprecation list.

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  • Cassandrichdalias@hachyderm.io
    Jul 23, 2026, 2:07 PM

    @seuros Right, but in those other cases, the device in question was a fixed installation inside the computer's enclosure that you had chosen to trust, not an external device. I've always deemed bus-mastering DMA a design flaw in all of those other things too, though IOMMU mostly fixed it on hardware new enough to have an IOMMU that's an actual security boundary and not just advisory like some early ones were.

    None of this detracts from what you're doing, and I'm glad you'll be wiring up the IOMMU stuff.

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  • Abdelkader Boudihseuros@bsd.cafe
    Jul 23, 2026, 2:18 PM

    @dalias Thanks.
    the real distinction isnt internal versus external.

    Without an IOMMU, an attacker can plug in a FireWire cable and the controller may have unrestricted DMA access. With an IOMMU, the FireWire controller only sees the buffers the driver explicitly maps. From the attacker’s perspective, it is like being locked in an empty room.

    If you leave your desktop unattended, PCIe is effectively the same attack vector, it just requires opening the case or otherwise getting access to an internal slot. That is a higher physical barrier.

    For this exact reason is why APPLE hardware and consoles rarely provide such ports.

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  • Chris Siebenmanncks@mastodon.social
    Jul 24, 2026, 1:47 AM

    @seuros @dalias I have a memory that early GPU computation on shared machines was held back partly because you could exploit your direct GPU access to have it DMA things all over the place (either deliberately or by accident, crashing the machine). I vaguely remember some cloud provider (Google?) wrote a paper about how they had to thoroughly test PCIe switches and other things in order to make GPUs safe on their then-current environment.

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  • khmkhm@hj.9fs.net
    Jul 23, 2026, 2:20 PM
    thunderbolt devices are not usually fixed installations inside the enclosures, same for e.g. eGPUs. the security boundary these days is very much 'late firewire' in style.

    except we don't get plug-in debuggers with thunderbolt! underrated firewire utility right there

    CC: @seuros@bsd.cafe @dalias@hachyderm.io
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  • Adrian Chadd <verified.png>erikarn@mstdn.social
    Jul 23, 2026, 5:40 PM

    @encthenet @seuros We'll tackle that eventually, there's a lot of cleanup to do and both seuros and i have plenty of device<->device setups to test this on.

    (I've already found lols when doing iperf between FW connected devices so that's on my plate to fix..)

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  • Grant_Hgrant_h@mastodon.social
    Jul 23, 2026, 5:37 PM

    @seuros Audio person with a firewire i7 laptop here, appreciating this.
    I have been wanting to move my old i7 gen3 laptop off windows, but it has the Texas Instruments FW chipset, which is the gold standard for audio. I've done 16 channels for 8 solid hours without losing a bit.

    Thank you!

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  • Troubletrouble@masto.ai
    Jul 23, 2026, 7:42 PM

    @seuros I still have some firewire devices gathering dust in the closet. free to good home (though shipping may be an issue if you're not in the US).

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  • Abdelkader Boudihseuros@bsd.cafe
    Jul 23, 2026, 7:45 PM

    @trouble Thanks ❤️

    I'm not in the US but which devices are we talking about ?

    You can ship them to @erikarn ... We work together in the stack. But only if we don't have them... Else you can use them. (we merged the drivers 😀 )

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  • adritheonlyadritheonly@mastodon.social
    Jul 23, 2026, 5:41 PM

    @seuros Wow! My 14yr old PC with its 2 even older HDDs just blushed. Any chance some of those "old" SSDs can migrate to South Africa?

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  • guentherguenther@chaos.social
    Jul 23, 2026, 6:58 PM

    @seuros You bought FIVE THOUSAND old computers? Do you live in a warehouse or something?

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  • Abdelkader Boudihseuros@bsd.cafe
    Jul 23, 2026, 7:08 PM

    @guenther I don't have have 5000 computer now. I buy a pallet with 300 mac minis or 200 laptops, ect ... (they are cheap because not all of them are working, or marked as working)

    I take 1-2 at home, make get the drivers, install them.
    The vendor handle the logistic to deliver them to some place that need them.

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  • guentherguenther@chaos.social
    Jul 23, 2026, 7:23 PM

    @seuros Wow! So basically there's now a shop somewhere in Tangier that's selling computers with freebsd preinstalled?

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  • Abdelkader Boudihseuros@bsd.cafe
    Jul 23, 2026, 7:38 PM

    @guenther No.

    The stores are all over Morocco , One contact got me access to another....

    They have unsold inventory rotten. They have weird stock .

    I get them for free or less than 100$. I preinstall them with FreeBSD and then we donate them to orphanage, poor people in villages or old people.

    2GB RAM and 64GB Disk is good for watching youtube and reading digital newspaper and play basic games.

    Image attached toot
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  • Robrbender@mastodon.social
    Jul 23, 2026, 9:01 PM

    @seuros Thank you for giving old hardware new life. It drives me crazy when people describe old machines as garbage just because Apple or MS won't support newer OS versions on them. These machines are plenty powerful for that vast majority of computer users.

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  • Abdelkader Boudihseuros@bsd.cafe
    Jul 23, 2026, 9:08 PM

    @rbender The garbage is the software.

    You’re probably reading this on a machine with more computing power than all of humanity had in 1950.

    or on a phone that is more powerful than all the computers that took humanity to the Moon.

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  • Adron 🤘🏻adron@metalhead.club
    Jul 23, 2026, 10:54 PM

    @seuros @chu the hardware is still usable too. Albeit inefficiently, but usable. I use cheap machines to spin up stuff all the time and it’s often better than using cloud resources!

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