It's bizarre to me there are people cheering on the potential death of x86. Sure it has warts, but it is an accidentally created mostly-open platform we'll likely never see created again. And ARM's vaulted power efficiency advantages are really overblown, having more to do with different design goals and not needing to care about a diverse platform than inherent advantages of the underlying cpu architecture. I suspect if x86 ecosystem does die we won't end up with much to show for it compared to what will be lost.
They are too smart to repeat the mistake of the IBM PC again. Even with "open" ISAs, kernels, they will rules-lawyer out the blackbox part out just like with Android phone makers etc.
Weird mobile SoCs are increasingly open. There's device tree. Modern Pixel devices use UEFI.
Why bother with obfuscated nonstandard schemes when it gets you bad PR and increases your own development costs to get a FOSS stack up and running? Manufacturers just lock the bootloader instead. That can't be reverse engineered around.
Thats what I meant. They will find some other part of the stack to lock down to rules lawyer against the openness of whatever the rest of the stack is. You have an open source Linux kernel, you may have an open source chip, so as you said they might cryptographically lock the bootloader. And now Android I believe is trying to make an end run around drivers in the Linux layer too. If thats true then manufacturers will jump to shift drivers into the Apache layer instead of the GPL kernel. ie if they even provide source dumps at all.
edit: It seems I am misinformed about the moving drivers above part. Perhaps I might have confused this from Fuchsia. In any case the main point was that as you yourself gave the example of, they will always find some part of the stack to hide all the real power/real logic into even if the other parts are open.
