[Replicant] replicant make comment on the pinephone
Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli
GNUtoo at cyberdimension.org
Sun Jul 14 13:45:08 UTC 2019
On Sat, 13 Jul 2019 15:40:53 +0300
"ni nhar" <ninhar at inbox.lv> wrote:
> On pine64's forum I wrote this post
Do you have a link to that?
> The Wifi/BT chip is RTL8723BS.
Thanks a lot for the information. We will also need to know if the OS
is supposed to load the firmware or not.
Replicant will not ship any nonfree firmware.
On the phones currently supported the internal WiFi doesn't work because
of that. So many people use external WiFi dongles.
> PinePhone has the EG25 modem, which is the Global
> LTE version of EC25.
Thanks. This was also confirmed to me by someone at the BattleMesh
conference but we didn't have enough time to gather more information
on that modem.
> The LTE modem connected by USB bus.
This is possible to isolate. We'll just need to look into usbguard or
USB peripherals whitelist to do that.
We didn't look into that yet for the phones currently supported by
Replicant, because, for the phones that use HSIC (which is a subset of
USB) as I understand, on the HSIC on theses phones, the host has
to reset the bus to enable the re-enumeration of the device, which
happens when the modem firmware is loaded. Note that here the modem
firmware is already on the device on a dedicated partition, and it's not
shipped by Replicant.
> Modem protocol is AT command set.
We will need to look if that's well supported by that modem or not. The
quectel-modems osmocom project[1] has probably some information on that
for the EC25.
For instance, I recall well, the palm pre also had AT, but the calls
notifications were not sent through AT but through another custom
protocol, and people ended up using that later protocol instead,
because of that.
Also, in the long run, if QMI is well supported by the modem, using it
might be more robust and way faster than AT.
> The A64 bootloader is open source and maintained
> by Sunxi.
There is very few probability of that code containing proprietary
software but I'll still have to check by myself the mainline u-boot
code for similar boards to be completely sure.
> Does it make the pinephone suitable for replicant?
It looks way more suitable than the phones already supported by
Replicant.
I've added a summary of what is known here:
https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/Pinephone
References:
-----------
[1]https://osmocom.org/projects/quectel-modems/wiki/Wiki
Denis.
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