This reminded me of a real life story, from the tip or my tongue so details might be inaccurate, but I remember hearing that a/the main MINIX maintainer, all of the sudden, started getting bug reports or some type of feedback from somebody, that ended up being an Intel employee looking to use MINIX for either ME or AMT.
In short, these hardware devices are 100% capable of having their own independent OS, processes with kernel and all, totally obscured from the end user.
This reminded me of a real life story, from the tip or my tongue so details might be inaccurate, but I remember hearing that a/the main MINIX maintainer, all of the sudden, started getting bug reports or some type of feedback from somebody, that ended up being an Intel employee looking to use MINIX for either ME or AMT.
In short, these hardware devices are 100% capable of having their own independent OS, processes with kernel and all, totally obscured from the end user.