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Crystal Installs OpenBSD on the PinePhone
- Stracke 5y ago[flagged]
- nilsb 5y agoThe article mentions that "Unlike most SBCs, the Pinephone contains a rechargeable battery intended to power the device. Correct configuration of the charging circuits, including various safety features such as thermal protection will not be enabled by the current OpenBSD kernel as of the time of writing." Is that really the case? If so, that seems like an unnecessarily dangerous design. I would expect safety features not to rely on (user-replaceable) software.
- Arnavion 5y agoI'd rather have features rely on user-controlled software than hardware-vendor-controlled software.
- squarefoot 5y agoWhen dealing with Lithium cells, the less software the better. If there's need to change dis/charging parameters from software, then that must be done behind a hardware protection with higher priority, so that the users still have control but cannot play outside safety limits. Not implementing a hardware safety seems really a bad deign choice to me.
- laputan_machine 5y agoDo you think thermal protection is an optional feature? Because that's what would happen in some cases if it's only defined through software. Every electronics project working with Li-Ion batteries in my opinion should use an overcharge/discharge protection circuit, it's basic safety. I don't want software to be able to control whether or not my phone turns into a bomb Edit: from this discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24596248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24596248 it looks like it is using http://files.pine64.org/doc/datasheet/pine64/AXP803_Datasheet_V1.0.pdf http://files.pine64.org/doc/datasheet/pine64/AXP803_Datashee... as a separate IC
- bildung 5y ago> You think lack of thermal protection is a feature? I read that as: vendor-controlled software sitting in hardware will be buggy and those bugs won't get fixed. Thermal protection implemented in user-controlled software can, over the long term, provide better safety because bugs can be fixed.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoThen stick it in a user-flashable chip, but still ship it pre-flashed. The point it that failing to init something at runtime should never be a safety problem.
- toolz 5y agoHow is a user flashable chip any different than shipping it preconfigured to be safe in software? The idea that there's more safety with physical separation but the same level of configurability seems incorrect at a glance. People will misconfigure either way. Freedom is always safer given a large enough window, just maybe not always safer in the short term.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoThe point is that if you run a new OS on the hardware (say, OpenBSD...) and it doesn't set things up, that failure to configure the running system should not result in a safety problem. Now one obvious way to do this is to do it in hardware, but the point was made that then you have to hope that the hardcoded safety measures are bug-free. So, the obvious fix is to do it in firmware, and allow updating the firmware, but do ship with it pre-flashed in persistent memory. Thus, doing nothing is safe, if a bug is found you can fix it, and yes a user could flash unsafe firmware but they'd have to go out of their way to do so; the default is to be safe regardless of what the main system OS does.
- toolz 5y agoA user has to go out of their way to flash an OS too, I'm not sure I buy the argument that open architecture is going to surprise people who also know how to flash an OS to a very new and unsupported device. No one is trivially flashing different OSes to pinephone and thus they'd need a good deal of domain knowledge to even achieve this goal. Effectively that means no one is flashing an OS to the pinephone, getting it to work but somehow is ignorant to the fact that pinephone has a battery and that battery could present danger if handled improperly. It seems like a safety measure that increases complexity which could potentially decrease safety just as likely as it is to increase safety.
- thereddaikon 5y agoI'd rather such things be a purely hardware implementation.
- Bancakes 5y agoKnowing BSDs, this is codeword for "we don't know how to do it, nor do we care to."
- perihelions 5y agoThere was a lengthy HN thread discussing the question (software-based thermal protection): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24596248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24596248 ("Let's talk about safety of Pinephone (xnux.eu)") (2020)
- jamesy0ung 5y agoThis comment probably comes off as ignorant, but what is the point of BSD today? The only use I see is for ZFS because it is built in.
- aerique 5y agoAs a refuge from Linux, Windows and / or OS X.
- brobdingnagians 5y agoLots of reasons, but often not what you think of as a typical desktop or server OS. FreeBSD is often used by corporations as a base to build things on because of its more generous license. Playstation's OS is based on FreeBSD. NetBSD is used on lower power or exotic devices since it is designed to be very portable, and is used as a base for some rump kernels and being able to compile device drivers into application software. OpenBSD is quite popular for bastions, routers, and firewalls because it is easy to administer, secure by default, and has pf for firewall rules. It is also a research OS and can experiment with changing things or deprecating things more quickly. And some of it is just preference and what you need it for. I run OpenBSD servers because I like how administration works, it is secure by default, upgrades are extremely easy, and all of the software I need works on it.
- goodpoint 5y ago> because of its more generous license Gifting an OS to companies that use it to compete against the FLOSS ecosystem. That's a bit of a self-own.
- brobdingnagians 5y agoDifferent purpose, which succeeded. It is a different philosophy to not be jealous of whatever use someone may make of it, even to making money. Why force a commercial venture to duplicate work if you can help them as well? If you can release high quality software which gets used and advances the state of the art _everywhere_, then that sounds like a good deal. I understand why copyleft might be useful in some circumstances, Linux has gained great adoption with the commercial tech giants because of it, but there is room for all philosophies in the code world; and they suit different purposes and temperaments. Some people simply feel happy that their high quality code is adopted and used, maybe they play Playstation and are happy they contributed to high quality entertainment, the world is a better place because of it.
- Stracke 5y ago[flagged]
- m12k 5y agoIs Crystal the name of the author of this post? I couldn't find any other mention of the name, neither in this article, in its source or on the about/faq page of the site. This doesn't look like it's a personal blog where I'm expected to know who the author is already. (I was curious since I originally thought the article had something to do with the Crystal language, e.g. like how Zig is being used for cross-compilation)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 4cao 5y agoGoing by what's on the other pages, it seems to be the name (or nickname) of the author: > Our resident Crystal Kolipe checks out the Pinephone, with mixed results. https://www.exoticsilicon.com/crystal/pinephone_202102 https://www.exoticsilicon.com/crystal/pinephone_202102 https://www.exoticsilicon.com/welcome https://www.exoticsilicon.com/welcome
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- miguelmurca 5y agoBetween the EULA for, erm, looking at the website, or the intro page, or the bird that flies away on the home page, I don't know whether I'm curious or concerned
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- drewg123 5y agoOne returns ETIMEDOUT, and the other returns EIO. Even without further understanding the code at this point, we can add two printf calls to identify which path is being followed Printf debugging feels like stepping back in time. I guess OpenBSD does not have dtrace?