When I had a larger homelab, I found it was a large proportion of my electricity usage.

A constant 200W adds up, and 200W of heat is not desirable during Australian summers.

I have settled on a PC Engine APU2 acting as my router, and a Raspberry Pi acting as my IoT brain. 10W.

My other devices sleep.

I want one but don't know why.

What's the benefit of have open firmware for this?

You can customize it.

I was until I did some device driver development. Imagine it like trying to write a HTTP client for an undocumented SMTP-as-a-service HTTP server.

* you know how to make HTTP requests (you know how to use I2C or PCI or ...)

* you know roughly what an SMTP-as-a-service should do (you know roughly what a display driver should do)

* you don't know the URLs (you don't know the addresses)

It's a fun exercise in collaborative reverse engineering.

Also there's survivorship bias. The reverse engineering that's most likely to succeed (and thus be written about) are the most approachable ones.

Bravo to all those doing this stuff!

That's regular device driver reverse engineering stuff, and not a bad analogy BTW.

But what marcan is doing is another level of awesomeness altogether. The m1n1 bootloader that runs the rest of MacOS in a VM for logging purposes is a hail mary move of such epic brilliance, it brings tears to my eyes.