Which phone should I buy for running Replicant?

Paul Sokolovsky pmiscml at gmail.com
Sun Sep 29 18:06:52 UTC 2013


Hello,

On Fri, 27 Sep 2013 13:20:23 +0200
Paul Kocialkowski <paulk at paulk.fr> wrote:

> Le jeudi 26 septembre 2013 à 09:48 +0100, Nick a écrit :
> > There is the OpenFWWF project, though that doesn't seem to be 
> > focussed on supporting many models, it looks like it can
> > effectively drive the older BCM4xxx chips well enough. Updating the
> > code to work on newer chips like the BCM4329 might be a
> > (relatively) easy way to sort the firmware problem out for many
> > newish phones, but it certainly isn't an area I have enough
> > knowledge or skill to do more than talk about.
> 
> I seriously doubt it is that easy or even doable and my expectations
> of ever seeing a free firmware for these chips are close to zero.

This probably gets more and more offtopic, but can you elaborate what
would be reasons for that? I obviously don't disagree, but I think that
the main reason for that is that community - at the whole, then GNU/FSF
endorsing subset, then finally those who often practice "freedom"
rhetoric - don't want free drivers *that* much. People want new Visual
Basic in the shape of JavaScript, to make it thrash and crash even on
their toaster, that's why projects like http://nodejs.org/ thrive, and
projects like OpenFWWF and
http://git.bues.ch/gitweb?p=b43-ucode.git;a=summary die.

Going beyond vulgar objectivism of "community gets what it deserves",
IMHO the main detriment to (community) development of open firmwares if
lack of widely hackable and easily retargettable C compiler, to handle
all the custom and obscure CPU cores vendors put into peripheral
devices.

And here FSF was multiple times blamed for purposedly obfuscating GCC to
make it harder (too hard) to hack. If you need references, here's quick
google: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/715#comment-6541 . That
dates back to 2005 and LLVM 1.5! And the real wave of that PR went just
lately, with LLVM 3.x releases, with some claiming that GCC already
started its decline, to crash into oblivion eventually (I don't have
refs handy for that, inquisitive reader surely can find it, I believe I
read that on/linked from phoronix.com).

> 
> On the other hand, ath9k_htc has a fully free firmware, released by
> Qualcomm, so it's the only WiFi chip that could permit having a free
> wifi firmware on an embedded device (read: phone, tablet, SBC).

Seeing 700Mb tarball, I skipped it first time. Now that you insisted
that it's *fully* free software, I spooled it to wget and the very same
moment it dawned on me why the size: it's just what I wrote above -
that "firmware" must have the whole toolchain attached to be actually
usable (rebuildable)! Indeed, it has. No wonder vendors don't rush into
making such releases - it's great chore to put that altogether to be
actually reusable by third parties. Kudos to Qualcomm for putting it all
together, I wonder if that can indeed be a breakthru for free WiFi
implementations. Up to date code is btw not on FSF side, but at
https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware/


> 
> -- 
> Paul Kocialkowski, Replicant developer
> 
> Replicant is a fully free Android distribution

-- 
Best regards,
 Paul                          mailto:pmiscml at gmail.com


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