Libre Hardware Founder's Project Sabotaged

"We're building a chip. A fast chip. A safe chip. A trusted chip."

One of the only open processor libre hardware project leaders, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton or @lkcl, was force drugged and imprisoned under psychiatric pretenses. Two men who were former business partners, David Calderwood and James Lewis targeting his project have called for the founder’s sectioning — that is for Luke to be taken away and forcibly drugged in the government’s custody, in a letter to a county government official.¹ The ethical technology specialist has been working on libre-soc for six years, a project to enable the entire computer to become open source from Linux down to the hardware description language (HDL) — a libre computer — using open source Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tooling such as yosys.² beginning in 2019 just as EDA tools were stable enough and PowerISA opened up, the completion of the project would mean no more backdoors for intelligence agencies. His project rewrites an SoC, or System-on-a-chip to be open source in Python demoing on 180 nm and 130 nm process nodes using Free Takeouts then commercializing at 22nm and below. Luke has autism and transient ischemic stroke symptoms which are triggerable by stress leaving him vulnerable to harassment. He alleges his medical condition has been exploited by former business partners David Calderwood and Lewis who have been sabotaging the project this last year. Luke has been so concerned for his well-being that he has signed a Last Will which bequeaths all the libre-soc IP to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in the case of his death and has specified a private medical examiner in case of malfeasance.³

It’s commonly thought that software and hardware are different however hardware design of an SoC can be done in python using open source toolchains (see footnote 1). Software typically refers to code that runs on top of hardware. Some code runs on top of the platform while other code is synthesized into netlists and later masks which are etched out in silicon. In the past, software was not entirely portable and there was great diversity in hardware architectures. Libre-soc also sets out to develop the firmware which runs on top of the silicon which in Linux are often binary blobs which are loaded onto the co-processors on an SoC at boot time. Libre-SoC aims to provide the hardware, firmware and software drivers.⁴

libre hardware is not yet available for consumers devices, in the sense that “ICs do not come with publicly available verilog files and the like.” Libre-SoC targets smartphones, chromebooks, tablets, smartwatches, routers which would fill this gap with access to the source. Libreboot expresses the same goal-sentiment as libre hardware in different words: “one day the right to repair movement will hopefully bring about universal access to such documents by the public.”⁵ A fully free libre computer would serve as an educational tool⁶, as a secure codebase from which one can integrate into many designs. Relating to my previous article series, Dr. Peter Chen once hosted a freshman seminar which taught this principle of system design peering into the entire stack of a microprocessor challenging students to implement HDL, drivers and system software deployed to an FPGA albeit likely with closed source EDA toolchains like Vivado and scaffolding code. Similarly, the tinkering one can do in a Linux GPL workspace on a libre computer, an individual could peer past the silicon down to the hardware description language (HDL) and gain a holistic view on how the entire computer is put together from system software to drivers and firmware. Various efforts have been made to realize this dream. Libreboot is one example of an effort to bring libre firmware to market booting laptops and computers by initializing hardware and starting the boot loader. Nouveau drivers on the GPL front also represent the expansion of the open source frontier born from reverse engineering efforts of developers to offer FOSS alternatives to proprietary Nvidia drivers to users of Linux working at the driver firmware level where users are free to study and reimplement proprietary blobs which interface with Linux and are loaded to the co-processors on their machines.

Hardware failures and insecure systems due to unauditability is a catastrophic issue with recent headlines such as the the 747 Boeing Max hardware failures causing a firmware loop which pointed the nose downward, or the proprietary software hardware system design flaws in the deadly Toyota unintended acceleration case which lacked of error correcting codes (ECC) usually found in safety-critical systems (EDAC RAM for the main cpu).⁷ The way in which the source code was viewed for the court case was also endemic and characteristic of the problem of proprietary hardware supply chains and closed-source hardware manufacturers: “A dozen embedded systems experts were allowed to review Toyota’s electronic throttle source code in a secure room in Maryland — described as the size of a small hotel room. The room, with a guard at the door, was disconnected from the Internet. No cellphones, paper, belts, or watches were allowed inside. The experts viewed Toyota’s code on five computers in cubicles.”⁸ In contradistinction, libre-soc source is freely distributed, downloaded and studied by anyone at all times having been worked on by developers dedicated to Software Libre.

One a single car system there could be hundreds of black box microprocessors networked together. The embedded systems expert witness called the Toyota implementation a “House of Cards” safety architecture. “Safety cannot be an afterthought; must be designed in Redundancy and fault containment are key,” ⁹ Proprietary hardware heterogeneous systems cannot properly serve these concerns without auditability and openness that is typical of open source projects. In the same vein, in describing what software runs on the a SoC, Mothy at ETH Zurich says linux runs on this cluster here and “the rest is a random brick-a-brack of runtime executives, realtime kernels, microkernels, other kinds of stuff that runs on all the other processors in the system that does collectively is the functions of the operating system.” Preventing safety critical systems from being auditable, with little software hardware co-design and operating system design principles, consisting of developers who are trapped in IP fiefdoms, insecure unauditable hardware represent a congealation of complex software requirements derived from an amalgamation of several black box systems with firmware arrangements. The extent of the harm is not even known to Toyota who reported to NASA that it had ECC when in fact it did not.¹⁰

“What is the design of this operating system? There isn’t one. This isn’t an operating system that’s been designed. It is an operating system that is congealed.”

Simple-V

Libre-SoC implements a novel prefix system inspired by sanskrit to handle many workloads at low power consumption called Simple-V which enables it to target commercial devices.¹¹

Six months of comprehensive estimates for the value of such a technology would yield billions in revenue and "that a mere USD $25 million investment would have us break even within i believe 4 years and be at a CONSERVATIVE 1.6 billion revenue by year 6. this based on developing a processor capable of easily exceeding the capability of an Intel equivalent, using far less power to do so, sold for 2/3 of the price." leveraging the OpenPower PowerISA ecosystem as a foundation.¹²

Luke alleges two individuals over the last year have been sabotaging the project and attempting to commandeer the rights to the technology calling for Luke’s detainment to a government official, souring relationships with funders, and stealing trademarks and designs, and creating a hostile project environment and loss of faith with the project lead; they are former colleagues James Lewis and David Calderwood whom Luke started the commercial arm of libre-soc with years ago under RED Semiconductors. Luke alleges his health conditions have been triggered in various interactions with them constituting assault and grievous bodily harm over the last year.

He alleges he and his team have been digitally stalked for the last year by two individuals. He alleges he has been physically assaulted by them as well as the British police refuse to collect evidence and simulatenously claim there is insufficient evidence.

Luke has autism and a health condition where he has symptoms of transient ischemic strokes. Calderwood in a letter to a member of parliament called for the libre hardware project lead’s detainment which came true a little over a week later under dubious circumstances in May of 2024. There is a scandal of psych wards imprisoning individuals because they are autistic and forcibly drugging them.¹³

Coercive psychiatric practices are a known issue and are subject to great upheaval and are at the center of controversy¹⁴ using questionable legal auspices to curtail rights and deprive people of their liberty. Sectioning in the UK or involuntary commitment elsewhere has been described as a “greased runway” happening in “pitch darkness” by legal scholar Michael Perlin.¹⁵ Critical Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz characterized psychiatry as “methods of social control”¹⁶ and schizophrenia as its sacred symbol, “the largest grab bag of all the misbehaviors which psychiatrists coerced by society or convinced by their own zeal are now ready to diagnose, prognose, and therapize,“¹⁷ where the druggings have been called “illegal fraud” by Trial Laywer Jim Gottstein¹⁸ illustrating the degree to which “psychiatry has been debauched by people who prefer to be policeman than physicians.”

1. https://lists.libre-soc.org/pipermail/libre-soc-dev/2024-June/006323.html

https://lists.libre-soc.org/pipermail/libre-soc-dev/2024-June/006335.html

2. Kuhn says there are two fronts to GPL on the kernel and javascript side however Software Libre goes all the way down to the silicon

https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/interviews/bradley-m-kuhn-karen-sandler/

The EDA tools yosys and nextpnr were published in a paper in 2019 which allowed synthesis onto FPGA’s and running linux on the softcores; 2019 also marks the beginning of the libre-soc project

https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.10407

3. https://lists.libre-soc.org/pipermail/libre-soc-dev/2024-June/006324.html

4. https://opencollective.com/libre-soc

5. https://libreboot.org/freedom-status.html

6. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1837854.1735998

7. https://www.eetimes.com/toyota-case-vehicle-testing-confirms-fatal-flaws/ for the ECC discussion

https://www.safetyresearch.net/Library/BarrSlides_FINAL_SCRUBBED.pdf for house of cards quote

8. https://www.eetimes.com/toyota-case-vehicle-testing-confirms-fatal-flaws/

9. https://www.safetyresearch.net/Library/BarrSlides_FINAL_SCRUBBED.pdf

10. https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_slides.pdf

Apparently because Toyota told NASA it had EDAC (ECC) [Bookout 2013-10-14PM 83:19-84:25] • Exponent public report claims ECC for Main CPU [p. 201] • Only claims SEC, not SECMED • But, actually no EDAC on RAM for 2005

More coverage on bit flips: https://www.eetimes.com/toyota-case-single-bit-flip-that-killed/

11. Currently, SoC producers give you a block diagram of the internals of the SoC but won't tell you specifically what each block is made of. Companies ship around IP cores which are black boxes in developing SoC's. Libre-soc reimplements each IP block from scratch so that the entire code-base falls into a free and open source (FOSS) kingdom allowing for free distribution of all the source code. Blocks include general purpose CPU's, GPU's Digital Signal Processor for audio and video processing, and baseband modem and memory controllers in what are called hetergeneous systems running a mixture of microkernels and complex firmware arrangements to facilitate communication across security boundaries. In libre-soc, the cross-cutting concerns of IP and security boundaries are one system as it is all libre under LGPL or Lesser Gnu Public License.

Luke achieved this by designing a hybrid GPU-CPU-VPU architecture on the SoC which supports vectorized ISA built on top of IBM's OpenPower PowerISA platform which was opened in 2019 to create Simple-V -- a scalable vector ISA for many kinds of workloads including low power embedded and DSP workloads as well as power efficient super computing. The hybridization was key to lower power consumption and supporting many types of workloads on a single processor by extending the Power ISA to support scalar vectorized ISA's with IBM's support from the OpenPower foudation.

As the project evolved over the last six years, Luke has achieved a shuttle run on 180nm, deployed the soft-core to several FPGA's and made great strides in implementing Simple-V, solving the SIMD opcode proliferation problem (https://www.sigarch.org/simd-instructions-considered-harmful/)for vetorized instructions by adding a scalar prefix context added on top of PowerISA. He draws inspriation from sanskrit where prefixes are used to enhance verbs with direction and intent. There is a parallel between vectorized scalar ISA's to add a vectorisation context and sanskrit's prefixes. Luke studied sanskrit and designed this language with reusable abstract prefixes enabling efficient parallel computing where the same instruction is repeated many times by looking at the prefix. The vectorized ISA instructions allows for algorithms previously intended for power-hungry GPU's to run on tiny devices such as smartphones and watches redesigning the modern processor from the bedrock.

12. From libre-soc.org: In the late 1980s IBM developed a POWER family of processors. This evolved to a specification known as the POWER ISA. In 2019 IBM made the POWER ISA Open source, to be looked after by the existing OpenPOWER Foundation. Here is a longer history of IBM POWER microprocessors. These IBM proprietary processors happen to implement what is now known as the POWER ISA. The names POWER8, POWER9, POWER10 etc. are product designations equivalent to Intel i5, i7, i9 etc. and are frequently conflated with versions of the POWER ISA (v2.07, v3.0c, v3.1b).

Libre-SOC is basing its Simple-V Vectorisation CPU extensions on POWER ISA, because it wants to be able to specify a machine that can be completely trusted, and because POWER, thanks to IBM's involvement, is designed for high performance.

13. There is a large scandal around autistic individuals incarcerated in psych wards where their medical conditions are labelled of psychiatric origin.

https://www.autism.org.uk/what-we-do/news/autistic-people-in-mental-health-hospitals

14. https://www.amazon.com/Your-Consent-Not-Required-Guardianships/dp/1637741480

madinamerica.com

15. https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sulr/vol41/iss3/4/

16. Thomas Szasz, a prominent critic of psychiatry says that “law and psychiatry are similar in that both disciplines are concerned with norms of conduct and methods of social control.

17. https://archive.org/details/schizophreniasac00szas/page/18/mode/2up?q=social+control

18. https://brokenmedics.com/being-abused-by-psychiatry-lies-in-court-and-winning-lawsuits-to-prevent-forced-drugging/