Sort of. The big deal with Oxide is that all the legacy compatibility with the IBM PC platform is gone, and the whole stack, top-to-bottom, is built by then (including firmware).
It's not like commodity x86 gear with black-box (often buggy) firmware and layer-upon-layer of hacks and compatibility kludges to present the hardware interface of a late model IBM PC AT.
The difference is that when you're buying a x86 system, the entire CPU bringup (incl. AMEGAS/openSIL on AMD) runs proprietary and poorly documented firmware. You're entirely at the mercy of the vendor.
Oxide has put immense effort into writing open-source platform initialization code, and built their own open-source BMC/RoT solution.
So effectively I’m at the mercy of Oxide, at least as long as their system does not become some kind of standard.
Not in theory maybe, but in practice. Because as a customer, I would probably also need to put in immense effort to understand and maintain that software myself.
The CPUs are x64 but the architecture is not that of a PC, there is no BIOS, etc. You couldn't boot Windows or Linux on the bare metal. The hardware, firmware and hypervisor are custom built for control, safety and observability. On top of that, the application OS all run on VMs which _do_ have a (virtual) PC architecture.
To me as a casual outside observer, the fact that they're using hardware virtualization at the top of the stack, after bcantrill gave so many talks about running containers on bare metal, is the most disappointing part. They could have had unbroken control and observability from the bottom of the stack all the way to the top. They got so close!
The CPU is commodity, nothing else is. Costume Mainboard and firmware without BIOS and their own BMCish thing and their own Root of Trust. Same for their router. Standard chip, everything else is costume.
