4 ms·

From my understanding of the article, Postmarket or Lineage or any other mobile operating system will be able to make use of this project. The goal is to provid

by sznio 1y ago

From my understanding of the article, Postmarket or Lineage or any other mobile operating system will be able to make use of this project. The goal is to provide FOSS drivers, so that you can run Lineage without proprietary blobs copied from the distribution of Android provided by the device manufacturer. It's mainly a libre purity project. A Lineage user won't be able to tell a thing, but the system will be "ethically pure"

fsflover 1y ago
> Postmarket or Lineage or any other mobile operating system will be able to make use of this project. Any OS "is able" to use anything from any other OS - in theory and given infinite resources. In practice though, it makes a huge difference when something works by default.
- ric2b 1y ago
  No, software licensing often gets in the way.
  - fsflover 1y ago
    How does the licensing affect firmware blobs?
    - jrochkind1 1y ago
      They are also software that is licensed?
      - fsflover 1y ago
        AFAIK you can use and reverse engineer the firmware blobs on any OS, free or not.
        devmor 1y ago
        I wonder if it's one of those situations where the potential for legal system abuse is a chilling effect.
        fsflover 1y ago
        Can you elaborate?
        devmor 1y ago
        Such as when it's technically legal to do something as long as you do it a certain way, but the interested parties may not believe that you did it correctly and will bury you in legal discovery requests that financially ruin you or force you to stop. Or they sue anyways hoping for a favorable ruling that changes the interpretation of the law (Oracle v. Google for a famous example of this)
        jrochkind1 1y ago
        Legally, you mean? In the US? Interested in more info on this.
        M95D 1y ago
        Sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
        jrochkind1 1y ago
        That doesn't make sense to me, extracting/copying a firmware blob is not clean-room design. It would only be clean-room design, as the article you link to explains, if you constructed it yourself from scratch based on the functionality you understand it should have. But ok!
        xoa 1y ago
        You might have gotten lost on the steps involved in clean-room reverse engineering here? >extracting/copying a firmware blob is not clean-room design It's stage 1. Clean-room reverse engineering is about working with the nature of copyright, and classically goes roughly like this: 1. You set things up with a "contaminated" or "dirty" side team who have direct exposure to the IP in question, and a "clean" (or "virgin" is another older term) side team that are thoroughly firewalled. The clean side must only have devs who have never ever had any exposure to whatever it is you're trying to clean replicate [0]. 2. The dirty side is in charge of producing a "fact sheet"/spec. That side absolutely extracts/disassembles or whatever else to get at the target, which is precisely what "contaminates" them. They are looking at copyrighted code. Then they use that research to a create a purely factual spec, which is then passed across the firewall to the clean side. This must be the only communication. 3. The clean side then uses that to write new code themselves that will handle state per the factual spec they've been given. The reason it works is that (in the US) purely factual information cannot be copyrighted, there's no "sweat of the brow" doctrine or the like. Copyright, unlike patents, does not cover ideas or methods, it's about the creativity of the person in question. You can't copyright the mathematics of a function, of "when X input is received Y is output", or of general concepts. So if two (or more) people independently create works that happen to cover the exact same subject matter, but can prove they were fully independent, then it doesn't matter even if it happened to be literally identical (however improbable that would be). Each would have their own independent copyright on it. So clean-room RE avoids all the legal snarls around "how close is this" in favor of the simple binary question of "did the team that wrote this RE'd code have any exposure whatsoever to copyrighted IP?" If the answer to that is "no" that's the end of any legal complaint, because by definition their output cannot be a derivative work. Software patents short circuit that, part of the many reasons they're evil, but as a practical matter the number of really fundamental hard to avoid ones is rapidly shrinking because it's 2025 and by 2005 a lot of the foundations had long since been done. ---- 0: Which is not necessarily trivial to hire for, because the kind of person who has the kind of skills you need also is going to tend to enjoy hacking around and reverse engineering stuff for fun anyway increasing the chance they've managed to contaminate themselves.
galangalalgol 1y ago
There aren't even any arm or x86 desktops that are completely blob free. There is some ridiculously expensive amd power hungry power9 thing that nothing will run on, and some of sifive's newer boards might qualify. Every arm at least has some soc blobs. And every x86 has something like ime. Going straight for a blob free phone seems like getting ahead of ourselves. How about we shoot for a completely free rpi usable on the desktop first?
- M95D 1y ago
  Rockchip AFAIK doesn't have any. It boots with mainline u-boot, but it doesn't include any wifi or other radios.
  - galangalalgol 1y ago
    It os definitely more open than most, thanks! I'm pretty sure it still has the masked boot rom before getting to the open bits. While the tpl and ddr are still blobs and might harbor naughtiness, people have at least figured out how to edit the blobs https://github.com/hbiyik/rkddr https://github.com/hbiyik/rkddr
    - M95D 1y ago
      U-boot for Rockchip builds it's own TPL. I'm using it right now. It can also use Rockchip's TPL, but that's optional, not the default. DDR training code is here: https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/tree/master/drivers/ram/rockchip https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/tree/master/drivers/ram/roc...
  - naasking 1y ago
    Also, libreboot supports quite a bit of hardware. What binary blobs are left of you have one of those systems?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

by sznio 1y ago

fsflover 1y ago

> Postmarket or Lineage or any other mobile operating system will be able to make use of this project. Any OS "is able" to use anything from any other OS - in theory and given infinite resources. In practice though, it makes a huge difference when something works by default.

ric2b 1y ago
No, software licensing often gets in the way.
- fsflover 1y ago
  How does the licensing affect firmware blobs?
  - jrochkind1 1y ago
    They are also software that is licensed?
    - fsflover 1y ago
      AFAIK you can use and reverse engineer the firmware blobs on any OS, free or not.
      - devmor 1y ago
        I wonder if it's one of those situations where the potential for legal system abuse is a chilling effect.
        fsflover 1y ago
        Can you elaborate?
        devmor 1y ago
        Such as when it's technically legal to do something as long as you do it a certain way, but the interested parties may not believe that you did it correctly and will bury you in legal discovery requests that financially ruin you or force you to stop. Or they sue anyways hoping for a favorable ruling that changes the interpretation of the law (Oracle v. Google for a famous example of this)
      - jrochkind1 1y ago
        Legally, you mean? In the US? Interested in more info on this.
        M95D 1y ago
        Sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
        jrochkind1 1y ago
        That doesn't make sense to me, extracting/copying a firmware blob is not clean-room design. It would only be clean-room design, as the article you link to explains, if you constructed it yourself from scratch based on the functionality you understand it should have. But ok!
        xoa 1y ago
        You might have gotten lost on the steps involved in clean-room reverse engineering here? >extracting/copying a firmware blob is not clean-room design It's stage 1. Clean-room reverse engineering is about working with the nature of copyright, and classically goes roughly like this: 1. You set things up with a "contaminated" or "dirty" side team who have direct exposure to the IP in question, and a "clean" (or "virgin" is another older term) side team that are thoroughly firewalled. The clean side must only have devs who have never ever had any exposure to whatever it is you're trying to clean replicate [0]. 2. The dirty side is in charge of producing a "fact sheet"/spec. That side absolutely extracts/disassembles or whatever else to get at the target, which is precisely what "contaminates" them. They are looking at copyrighted code. Then they use that research to a create a purely factual spec, which is then passed across the firewall to the clean side. This must be the only communication. 3. The clean side then uses that to write new code themselves that will handle state per the factual spec they've been given. The reason it works is that (in the US) purely factual information cannot be copyrighted, there's no "sweat of the brow" doctrine or the like. Copyright, unlike patents, does not cover ideas or methods, it's about the creativity of the person in question. You can't copyright the mathematics of a function, of "when X input is received Y is output", or of general concepts. So if two (or more) people independently create works that happen to cover the exact same subject matter, but can prove they were fully independent, then it doesn't matter even if it happened to be literally identical (however improbable that would be). Each would have their own independent copyright on it. So clean-room RE avoids all the legal snarls around "how close is this" in favor of the simple binary question of "did the team that wrote this RE'd code have any exposure whatsoever to copyrighted IP?" If the answer to that is "no" that's the end of any legal complaint, because by definition their output cannot be a derivative work. Software patents short circuit that, part of the many reasons they're evil, but as a practical matter the number of really fundamental hard to avoid ones is rapidly shrinking because it's 2025 and by 2005 a lot of the foundations had long since been done. ---- 0: Which is not necessarily trivial to hire for, because the kind of person who has the kind of skills you need also is going to tend to enjoy hacking around and reverse engineering stuff for fun anyway increasing the chance they've managed to contaminate themselves.

galangalalgol 1y ago

There aren't even any arm or x86 desktops that are completely blob free. There is some ridiculously expensive amd power hungry power9 thing that nothing will run on, and some of sifive's newer boards might qualify. Every arm at least has some soc blobs. And every x86 has something like ime. Going straight for a blob free phone seems like getting ahead of ourselves. How about we shoot for a completely free rpi usable on the desktop first?

M95D 1y ago
Rockchip AFAIK doesn't have any. It boots with mainline u-boot, but it doesn't include any wifi or other radios.
- galangalalgol 1y ago
  It os definitely more open than most, thanks! I'm pretty sure it still has the masked boot rom before getting to the open bits. While the tpl and ddr are still blobs and might harbor naughtiness, people have at least figured out how to edit the blobs https://github.com/hbiyik/rkddr https://github.com/hbiyik/rkddr
  - M95D 1y ago
    U-boot for Rockchip builds it's own TPL. I'm using it right now. It can also use Rockchip's TPL, but that's optional, not the default. DDR training code is here: https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/tree/master/drivers/ram/rockchip https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/tree/master/drivers/ram/roc...
- naasking 1y ago
  Also, libreboot supports quite a bit of hardware. What binary blobs are left of you have one of those systems?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]