On Tue, 24 Aug 2021 08:52:58 +0200 "W. Kosior via Replicant" <replicant@osuosl.org> wrote: > True, although even Replicant phones are not 100% free. Perhaps you've > already heard that no libre cellular modem exists. A free firmware (OsmocomBB) exist, but it's for very old mobile phones (that aren't smartphones) and the Openmoko Smartphones modem. The OpenMoko part that runs GNU/Linux only has 128M of RAM, and there is (almost) no upstream kernel support for it.
> Likewise, I never heard of any phone with free wi-fi. I think reverse engineering Realteck or Broadcom firmwares would be a good idea to fix that: - Some Realtek firmwares have been published as hexadecimal numbers in source code covered by the GPL. So if we can somehow reconstruct the source code from the 8051 assembler, it could yield some free software firmware. - Many Broadcom WiFi chips have a rom, and the firmware is a patch on top of that rom. There are (hopefully free software) projects to develop patches for that rom. > Bootloader The Pinephone bootloader is free software, so that's at least a big improvement. Though we need to add support for the Pinephone in Replicant 11. > and GPS also tend to have freedom problems and modem isolation in > today's phones is most often bad. On the Pinephone the GPS is inside the modem so it indeed has freedom issues as you need the modem to be on to use it. Though it's close to unusable due to poor sensitivity, so it's probably not a big issue. > Porting Replicant to a device like PinePhone would solve the > bootloader and modem isolation problems and could also make the > device more usable. For the modem isolation, we would need to look into software like usbguard or USB devices whitelists. As the bootloader is free, we might be able to disable USB completely in u-boot to avoid potential attacks from the modem. > I wonder if and when that gets done. The plan was to add support for the Galaxy SIII (GT-I9300) first as many current users already have that phone. I got delayed a lot because I had trouble making the modem work. I was given pointers that could make it work but did not try them yet. > And their customer support was terrible. As I understand they state that their devices are not ready yet for general customers but are more intended for developers. > > I'm tempted to try to do a DIY phone > > That would be hard. There were and are actual teams of people with > monetary investments making efforts towards delivering a libre phone, > with PinePhone you mentioned being one of the examples. If what they > managed to make has major shortcomings in terms of usability, it is > unlikely a single person will be able to achieve something better. > It might still make sense if you treat it as just a hobby project, > though. There are sometimes shortcut. It's sometime possible to work with companies producing hardware like Pine64 to get modified designs. It still require to get some money to do it. Crowdfunding could be a solution, though it also take a lot of time to run such campaigns. > > or XBMC device or MP3 player with one of their boards. > > That seems rather easily achievable. The resulting device is just not > going to be as compact as a consumer one. It could be really interesting as without WiFi or modems, the device could way more easily get the RYF certification. For small music players, the Rockbox project looks nice, but not all the devices have free bootloaders. As for making new or modified devices, the main component to consider is the System On a Chip (SOC): These have a lot of hardware blocks inside, like a CPU, a GPU, display controller, a bootrom, etc. And you probably can't change the hardware blocks that easily inside as it probably costs way more money to build chips. For instance if an Allwinner A20 System On a Chip is chosen, I think that every function commonly used of that chip works with free software, including the GPU and the video decoding acceleration. If you instead take a system on a chip with a PowerVR GPU, it's extremely likely that that GPU will never work with free software. Some System on a chip lack free bootloaders or require bootloaders singed by the vendors. Denis.
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