Re:It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware
by jillesvangurp on Wednesday September 01, 2021 @02:07AM
(#28376851)
That actually goes to the heart of the problem, modern SOCs are basically proprietary components gobbled together on a chip with some internal networking/wiring that each come with their own software that does a lot of stuff before even getting around to booting Linux.
The problem is the proprietary nature of this stuff and the fact that a lot of it is outside of the scope of scrutiny that goes into Linux. It's held together with what basically amounts to glorified duct tape. It's complicated. It has weird failure modes and occasionally this stuff has expensive issues. Like for example security issues.
Very relevant if you want to build an open source phone platform or laptop. Not impossible; but it requires addressing a few things. Like connecting to a 5G network without relying on Qualcomm's proprietary software and hardware.
The real solution is not merely integrating these things as is and trying to reverse engineer them but engineer them from the ground up to work together and make sense together. That larger, open operating system does not really exist. And many proprietary equivalents on the market right now have an emergent/accidental design rather than something that was designed from the ground up.
The problem is the proprietary nature of this stuff and the fact that a lot of it is outside of the scope of scrutiny that goes into Linux. It's held together with what basically amounts to glorified duct tape. It's complicated. It has weird failure modes and occasionally this stuff has expensive issues. Like for example security issues.
Very relevant if you want to build an open source phone platform or laptop. Not impossible; but it requires addressing a few things. Like connecting to a 5G network without relying on Qualcomm's proprietary software and hardware.
The real solution is not merely integrating these things as is and trying to reverse engineer them but engineer them from the ground up to work together and make sense together. That larger, open operating system does not really exist. And many proprietary equivalents on the market right now have an emergent/accidental design rather than something that was designed from the ground up.