Talos II

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About

There are many reasons to consider such a workstation. Simply put, the goal of the Talos II is to place as much control in the hands of the system owner as possible.

The owner is given the electrical schematics, system firmware is open source, and the system can boot without any binary BLOBs. Even the OpenPOWER instruction set architecture is open.

There are no comparable x86, ARM, or RISC-V options. The Intel Management Engine and AMD Platform Security Processor cannot be removed or fully disabled. ARM is going through its own gradual lockdown. RISC-V does not provide adequate performance.

If you value security and freedom, I encourage you to learn more about the Talos II and Blackbird systems.

Videos

Articles

Raptor Resources

My System

Sagan Specs (after Carl Sagan)

System Assembly

Mainboard schematics, user manual, and firmware source code included on a cryptographically verifiable DVD.
Long 5/32" hex driver needed to attach the CPU heatsink.

Assembly Video

During the video, I am careful to demonstrate correct stand-off placement and mainboard insertion. The underside of the board is densely populated. Some users had issues with scraping off small surface mount resistors and had to return the board for repair.

Also, I build the Debian kernel (4.17 rc3) package at the 4:15 mark.

nashimus - Talos II System Assembly
Delicate surface mount components near a stand-off hole.

BMC and Boot Firmware EEPROM

The BMC and boot firmware flash memory are easily removable.
My system failed to post on first power on. It was nice to be able to easily remove the chip, flash the BMC firmware with an external programmer, put it back in, and continue troubleshooting.

Flashing was performed using flashrom, a Pomona 5252 SOIC clip, and an original Raspbery Pi. Flashrom required patching for compatibility with the flash chip. Compiling flashrom on the Pi took ages…

Pomona 5252 SOIC Clip

Serial Header Compatibility

I discovered that I had purchased an incompatible serial header.

AT/EVEREX - Not Compatible
DTK/INTEL - Compatible

After rewiring the serial port, I was able to see output from the IPL (Initial Program Load), during power on.

RAM Issues

My initial system configuration was 4x32GB RAM. However, one of the sticks was bad. After removing the bad stick, I was able to make it to Petitboot! The vendor cross shipped me a replacement without question.

Debian Linux

The 4.16 or newer kernel required for proper POWER9 hardware support, was not yet available in Debian stable. I wasn’t comfortable with using Debian testing, since “security updates for testing are not managed by the security team”.

I was able to work around this by installing a minimal Debian testing net install, set apt sources to Debian stable and downgrade, keeping the 4.16 kernel. I also had to update QEMU to 2.12.0, for QEMU/KVM virtual machines to work.

The little endian POWER PC release is ppc64el. Endian Little.

Endianess - Simply Explained - geek-and-poke.com

VGA Connector Issue

My 15 pin VGA connector was damaged during shipping and did not work. This was not a critical issue as I was able to monitor boot and interact with Petitboot via the serial console.

Bent VGA and Serial Connectors

However, I still wanted to be able to use the VGA port, so I RMA’d the board. Raptor CS got it fixed and sent back.

Compiling With 144 Threads!

With 4 threads per core (SMT4), this 36 core system has 144 threads.

make -j144

Building Firefox 119
Building LLVM

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