[Replicant] regarding future
Bob Ham
rah at settrans.net
Mon Oct 31 12:27:48 UTC 2016
On Fri, 2016-10-28 at 13:50 +0200, Wolfgang Wiedmeyer wrote:
> The code can be found here:
> https://code.fossencdi.org/kernel_i9300_mainline.git/
> The changes are currently on top of the 4.8 kernel. It is far from being
> usable, even if you accept the reduced functionality. The kernel boots
Kick ass :-)
> I did not
> yet investigate what work exactly is needed to get wifi and bluetooth
> working.
The chip needs to be reverse engineered which is a whole project in
itself. In fact it would be very good to have this because the chip,
Broadcom BCM4334, is used in a number of phones. Currently the only
WLAN chipset with free firmware is the Atheros ath9k family and they (1)
aren't used in mobile devices and (2) don't support newer standards such
as 802.11ac.
There was an effort to reverse engineer some earlier Broadcom chips:
https://lwn.net/Articles/314313/
http://netweb.ing.unibs.it/~openfwwf/
However, the resulting firmware has only ever been experimental. The
interest is from academia. For example, a 2014 paper from the OpenFWWF
authors was titled "Emitter Localisation from Reception Timestamps in
Asynchronous Networks":
http://netweb.ing.unibs.it/~openfwwf/localisation/
The purpose there is research rather than building usable free firmware.
> There is actually a lot of support for the device in mainline compared
> to most other devices. The reason is that Samsung also published Tizen
> for the Galaxy S3, named Trats2, and they tried to mainline a lot in the
> process.
Cool. The S3 gets even *more* attractive from a free software point of
view.
> So in summary, there is still a lot of development effort necessary and
> I would be very happy about contributions.
Excellent work, I look forward to hearing more. I'll see if I can't at
least test out your kernel tree at some point.
Cheers,
Bob
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