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That's made almost impossible by the bigger players in the SoC world like Qualcomm and Samsung. They created a multi level oligopoly which can only be challenge
by okanat 3y ago
That's made almost impossible by the bigger players in the SoC world like Qualcomm and Samsung. They created a multi level oligopoly which can only be challenged with nation state support (like Mediatek and Huawei did).
The problem is the drivers and documentation for those chips are very limited and short-lived. One simply doesn't get it without signing an NDA and buying some high thousands.
Without documentation it gets harder to optimally program them. On top of that add the know-how. Due to both NDAs and pure difficulty of working with low power systems, it is really hard to hire engineers who are both very knowledgeable and not bound by NDAs and willing to work on community projects that doesn't pay the significant wages that the consumer tech giants do.
Desktop Linux can get away with it if the desktop computer consumes slightly more power or laptop battery life is 2 hours shorter. People accept it. For phones any extra operations cause significant power usage. Everything in the stack needs to be optimized for it and regular Linux desktop stuff often isn't. Android has much tighter controls but it is 5-10x harder to program in the lower levels which again limits the supply of the engineers.
This is just getting a simple SoC and running Linux on top. Add similar complexities for every single peripheral.
- autoexec 3y ago> That's made almost impossible by the bigger players in the SoC world like Qualcomm and Samsung. They created a multi level oligopoly which can only be challenged with nation state support (like Mediatek and Huawei did). Which is why we need new chips to replace qualcomm/samsung/mediatek entirely in open devices. It's kind of crazy that nobody is willing to even attempt it. I'd gladly take the inevitable massive hit to performance if it meant fully open, documented, and auditable devices.
- giantrobot 3y agoFully open wireless basebands are unlikely if not (legally) impossible. Modern radio front ends have significant software control/definition from the baseband chipset/firmware. They'll happily run outside of regulated limits (ERP etc). The only reason they can get Part 22/15 licenses is because their firmwares are sold locked down and can't be adjusted outside of regulated limits. Anyone that gets halfway interested in trying to make an open baseband, necessitating a custom radio front end, gets quickly uninterested once they look at the development costs and then needing to get a license.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoProbably not economically viable in general but a device could have floss *ware and ship with immutable firmware.