From Sand to Screen: The Open Source Story of How Your Computer Actually Works

As an electronics student I've been playing around with ESP32 for a bit, but somehow I didn't realize that all I knew about my chip is that it worked. Once I decided to dig deeper into it, and to be honest, my mind was blown. our laptop consists of sand. Heat it produces is billions of tiny switches flipping their states. Also, most of the firmware running beneath the hood of our open source operating system is closed and almost no one cares about it.

In this talk I am going to share everything I found with you in the easiest possible way. We will go from silicon where the chips come from through different layers - from transistors to logic gates, CPU, OS, up to your terminal. Nothing too complicated, but enough for understanding the whole picture.

What I am planning to do during the talk is to highlight some of the best open-source projects which work on hardware level, but not many people know about in FOSS community — like RISC-V, coreboot or open PDKs. We are going to finish with a short live demo using only the tools available on your Linux box.

I'm just someone who got curious and went down a rabbit hole — and I think a lot of people in this room will find it as interesting as I did.

A complete understanding of hardware architecture and components, right from silicon up to your application code that runs on it.

What makes your laptop heat up, and what the race for nanometres is all about The whole open source hardware stack you've probably never heard of before coreboot,RISC-V, open PDKs, and more Linux commands to help you look inside your hardware and analyze it from within your console

Why each closed component of the hardware stack is another component controlled by somebody else, and what we can do about it