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Is there any information on whether the drivers on the phone will be open source as well? I'm on the fence, but the main thing stopping me is that I'm not very
by avar 13y ago
Is there any information on whether the drivers on the phone will be open source as well? I'm on the fence, but the main thing stopping me is that I'm not very keen on buying yet another phone powered by a bunch of proprietary binary blobs.
I'd like to hack on the software, build my own, try to install Debian on it instead etc. All that is going to be much harder if I have to use whatever kernel version their binary blobs target.
- achiang 13y agoWe plan on an unlocked phone, with an unlocked bootloader. Unfortunately, for the planned volume, we won't have much influence with the SoC vendor, and therefore, it is highly doubtful you will see open graphics / radio firmware. Sorry, it's not our preference either.
- ansible 13y agoJust for everyone's edification... You're unlikely to see an open-source firmware for the 3G/4G cellular radio, the WiFi, or the low level Bluetooth stack (up to the HCI layer). Ever. The reason? This stuff costs a lot to develop, and the major chip vendors don't want to give any help to their competition. As for graphics... I had heard an announcement by one SoC vendor who was just putting in more general-purpose processor cores, and they had planned to do all the video decoding (such as for H.264) and OpenGL graphics in software (using Mesa?). This was allegedly going to be possible with a power budget not too much larger than the typical hardware implementations of these blocks. What ever happened to them?
- superuser2 13y agoIsn't control of the radio necessary for the security and integrity of the cellular network/spectrum?