[Replicant] Apple iPhone 7 - possibility of a free baseband?

Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli GNUtoo at no-log.org
Tue Oct 4 13:43:21 UTC 2016


On Tue, 4 Oct 2016 02:19:06 +0100
Josh Branning <lovell.joshyyy at gmail.com> wrote:

> Apple iPhone 7 was released and made use of an iCE5LP4K device. [1]
Are you sure that this FPGA is used for the baseband?
If so, do we have more information on the design of this baseband:
- What external circuits does it require.
- Is it possible to design a libre baseband based on such FPGAs?

As for the iPhone 7, I fear that it won't be realistic to expect it to
be ported to Replicant.
The iDroid project ported some Apple smartphones under Android. The
iPhone 3g was, in iDroid, the device with the best support.

The amount of work required to make such devices usable seemed to be
huge.

Despite that, the people involved in the port succeeded to make lot of
the peripherals and hardware features work, but not the power
management[1].

As a result that device cannot used as a regular smartphone.
I recall that suspend-to-ram wasn't even working, so it was probably
lasting very few hours, I'd blindly guess it was something like 3/4/5 hours.

Also I fear that the ability to run your own bootloader and so on would
be severely restricted. That would probably require the bootrom to have
some bug[2].

[1]shttps://web.archive.org/web/20141024013316/http://www.idroidproject.org/wiki/Status
[2]https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Bootrom#Bootrom_Exploits

Denis.
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