[Cryptech Tech] goals / use cases

[Fredrik Thulin]

On Tuesday, January 27, 2015 06:11:28 AM Randy Bush wrote:
...
> as to the mcu, let's be lazy and use the cortex A8/9.  if it is good
> enough for iphone, it must be good enough for us :).  more seriously,
> for an agile prototype, it is more important to be sure it fits and runs
> well than making it tiny, cheap, ...  as rob says, go for the A9; if we
> don't want the memory management etc, we don't have to use it.  the
> challenge will be disabling all the household appliances.

I think we should have a look at the Cortex-A8 found on the Beaglebone rev C.

 It has a TI Sitara AM3358BZCZ100 1GHZ CPU 

  http://www.ti.com/product/AM3358/description

and it appears as if you can compile everything needed for it to boot from 
source.

  https://code.google.com/p/beagleboard/wiki/BeagleSoftCompile

(the signGP tool is not magical or secret at all, found the source here 
http://beagleboard.googlecode.com/files/signGP.c)

Besides this fundamental requirement of ours that the Beaglebone appears to 
meet, I think the benefit of that particular device is the availability of 
relatively cheap dev boards and not the least a known good reference design.

I expect a lot of things to get easier if we target a CPU that has been used a 
lot by open source minded people.

Since I haven't ordered any dev boards at all in the current calendar year, I 
promptly ordered one to be able to verify the ability to boot without any 
blobs =).

/Fredrik