Re:Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hackin...
by codedokode on Thursday November 03, 2016 @03:23AM
(#12862156)
Regarding drivers, they are probably present as linux kernel modules in original phone firmware. Cannot they be reused in a custom open firmware? Of course you might need a userspace components to control hardware too which is a problem.
Also SOC manufacturer usually has the drivers reference code but he might not publish it.
Re:Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hackin...
by Grishnakh on Thursday November 03, 2016 @01:40PM
(#12866144)
>Regarding drivers, they are probably present as linux kernel modules in original phone firmware. Cannot they be reused in a custom open firmware?
Generally not. Linux kernel modules generally can't be loaded by kernels with different versions, as the ABI constantly changes. It can be hard to use them even with the same version, if it was compiled differently. This is why they're always pushing for the drivers to be open-sourced and submitted to the kernel project for inclusion, because maintaining them separately is a giant PITA.
Phone makers don't bother because they don't care: they're not going to maintain the drivers very long anyway.
Back in the late 90s/early 2000s, you could just run Linux on your x86. Sometimes half your hardware didn't work, but as long as you could get Ethernet and display you were in pretty good shape usually. The thing is, you could install it. You could try it.
With ARM, everything is so specialized. Looking at the forum posts for this thing, half of the threads are about porting to devices.
The manufactures have no incentive to standardize the platform. They customize to a device and it's better for them if you just throw it out in two years when they drop support.
A limited number of hobby devices now use the device tree configuration, but the ARM platform is far from being as standard as Intel or Power.
If the Ubuntu Edge had been funded, I think we'd be in a difference space with at least a handful of devices that had some standardization (if only to accommodate Canonical). As it stands, ARM fragmentation is a huge problem for hackers/devs.