[Replicant] Firmware

Paul van der Vlis paul at vandervlis.nl
Thu Oct 1 20:17:50 UTC 2015


Op 30-09-15 om 22:15 schreef Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli:
> On Sun, 06 Sep 2015 01:56:38 +0200
> Paul van der Vlis <paul at vandervlis.nl> wrote:
> 
>> I found out that on my device (Galaxy Nexus) not only the wifi drivers
>> where needed to get wifi working. I did also need the "ducati-m3.bin",
>> firmware for "Hardware media encoding/decoding". Not sure why.
>> For my phone, I found information about the firmware on [2], but you
>> can also find much information using Google.
> This "ducati" microcontroller is inside the OMAP4 SOC, and if I
> remember well, it uses shared memory with the main CPU.
>
> I've not looked at the OMAP4 manual, so I don't know if anything
> prevents this "ducati" microcontroller from being able to read the
> main CPU's RAM.

Hmm, you are right. I've too easily installed that firmware.

> While the firmwares are supposed to run on a peripheral processor, you
> still have more risks when using non-free firmware.
>
> In Cyanogenmod, some proprietary libraries ended up in the firmware
> directory, and were ran by free software code that went into Replicant.
> So when you added this .so into your device's firmware directory, the
> main CPU executed that proprietary library without you even knowing it.

I have not installed an .so.

I don't use the Galaxy Nexus anymore, I use a Galaxy S3 now because I
wanted a camera. I will take a critical look at the firmware I am using.

Thanks for your info!

Paul van der Vlis.


-- 
Paul van der Vlis Linux systeembeheer Groningen
https://www.vandervlis.nl/



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