my struggles with the intel_pstate driver (and the ability to switch back to the ACPI driver) when trying to get the CPU in this box to clock above 0.8GHz, and my struggles with the box that replaced it spontaneously rebooting seemingly at random only when a display wasn't plugged in until I disabled SATA power saving in the UEFI gave me an idea, along with the recent boom in retrocomputing...
this won't happen, couldn't happen... but imagine if somebody built a computer with the raw horsepower of a modern PC, but the absolute minimum amount of abstraction baked into the machine itself.
at this point UEFI alone is orders of magnitude more complex than an entire DOS box from the early 90s. your "CPU" has multiple entirely independent CPUs with their own OS and firmware inside it, as does every so-called peripheral attached to it.
imagine if you could access the compute power of a Ryzen 3xx, but it was as close to being a DOS box in complexity as possible while still being able to do shit like regulate the CPU clock rate, or talk to USB devices and NVMe sticks.
*one* driver for each bit, *one* API for each bit, no nested Turing-complete systems wherever avoidable, no unnecessary layers of abstraction.
it'll never happen for many valid reasons, but I'd love to see it.
selfhosting.couchsurfing
npub1nq…6salp
2025-12-04 22:41:23 UTC
Author Public Key
npub1nq6ztqk0qhj0uay4yfpmdzs0cqt6wks7txn0kc28v5fyczte7kvsr6salpPublished at
2025-12-04 22:41:23 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "my struggles with the intel_pstate driver (and the ability to switch back to the ACPI driver) when trying to get the CPU in this box to clock above 0.8GHz, and my struggles with the box that replaced it spontaneously rebooting seemingly at random only when a display wasn't plugged in until I disabled SATA power saving in the UEFI gave me an idea, along with the recent boom in retrocomputing...\n\nthis won't happen, couldn't happen... but imagine if somebody built a computer with the raw horsepower of a modern PC, but the absolute minimum amount of abstraction baked into the machine itself.\n\nat this point UEFI alone is orders of magnitude more complex than an entire DOS box from the early 90s. your \"CPU\" has multiple entirely independent CPUs with their own OS and firmware inside it, as does every so-called peripheral attached to it.\n\nimagine if you could access the compute power of a Ryzen 3xx, but it was as close to being a DOS box in complexity as possible while still being able to do shit like regulate the CPU clock rate, or talk to USB devices and NVMe sticks.\n\n*one* driver for each bit, *one* API for each bit, no nested Turing-complete systems wherever avoidable, no unnecessary layers of abstraction.\n\nit'll never happen for many valid reasons, but I'd love to see it.",
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