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

[H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Hi,

> Am 04.10.2016 um 15:43 schrieb Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <GNUtoo at no-log.org>:
> 
> 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?

Footnote 35 of the Wikipedia article

	[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_(FPGA)#iCE40_.2840_nm.29links to

mentioned by Josh is

	https://web.archive.org/web/20160916230725/http://www.chipworks.com/about-chipworks/overview/blog/apple-iphone-7-teardown

This says:

	The Baseband is a PMB9943 (XMM7360) from Intel.

	In the “miscellaneous” section we have;

		• Lattice Semiconductor FPGA ICE5LP4K;

So it is probably used for fingerprint sensing or whatever.

> 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.

BR,
Nikolaus

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