First of all I haven’t done any HDL (Verilog, VHDL…) programming so I just know what is it…<p>For instance Linux is open source and the software is totally under your control so you can totally trust the software developers.<p>The thing is what if the hardware was the problem? How do people trust the hardware developers??<p>Couldn’t malicious things be done with HDL?
It's not safe to say that open source software is safer or less safe than proprietary software. You can't look at the source code of Microsoft Windows to know it doesn't have obvious back doors, but it's also unrealistic that you're going to audit 400 npm packages that your Javascript program uses every time they change.<p>It's hard to prove that hardware wasn't tampered with at the factory and in fact it is absolutely routine for hardware to come with "backdoors" such as boundary scan implementations, unexpected ways to read out firmware, etc.
There's far more to hardware than just designing the logic circuits (open source designs do exist such as Risc V) you also have to fabricate them and the processes for fabricating CPU's, GPU's and similar chips are probably the most advanced of any technology, requiring equipment that costs millions to billions of dollars.
It is, isn't it?<p><a href="https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-05-08-the-much-more-personal-computer.html" rel="nofollow">https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-05-08-the-much-more-p...</a>