Comment by _rdvw
3 years ago
This is just the user-space aspect of the modem, it still has a 40MB proprietary firmware blob that does all the fun stuff.
Also running long end-of-life and insecure Linux 3.18: https://github.com/the-modem-distro/quectel_eg25_kernel/blob...
I submitted a PR with my CVE auto-patcher which fixed many issues including numerous modem related ones which was ignored and closed: https://github.com/the-modem-distro/quectel_eg25_kernel/pull...
Respectfully, you really, seriously need to work on your communication skills. You seem to be doing good work and I respect that (I use Mull, for one), but... you systematically sound fairly aggressive and complaining about everybody. Just for that I wouldn't want to contribute to any of your projects, and I wouldn't want to depend too much on them either (who knows who you will piss off next and where your projects will go).
For instance, let's look at what you describe here as "my PR was fixing a ton of stuff but it was ignored and closed".
First, the title of your PR is "Make the kernel less awful"... really? How would you feel if I opened a PR saying "Make DivestOS suck a little less, but let's be honest, it will still be a piece of shit after that"?
Not even mentioning that you say "Untested, but shouldn't require more than a handful drop/reverts". So you just come and drop a huge PR that you haven't tested, and then you complain that others don't pick it up?
Before closing your PR, the maintainer said:
> Don't get me wrong, it's impressive, but there's no way I'm going to merge this. You can't send someone 424 patches to a repo and expect them to stop everything they're doing for a month and checking them one by one in case just one of them fucks up the entire system (or contains some kind of malicious code), even less so on a 3.18.140 kernel that originally comes from Qualcomm.
That is very fair, and I would not call that "being ignored" at all.
Keep up the good work, and learn to communicate in a constructive way!
Btw this is a great case for Chatgpt.
I am also aggressive over the internet. I don't know why. I'm so chill IRL.
Ive learned to copypaste my message and ask chatgpt to make it nice, but not eliminate the point.
I don't copypaste what it says, but I do find sentences that are nice, but still make my point. Its sooo good.
That is an interesting take indeed. And I respect the fact that you realized that you sound aggressive online and took action.
I will actually think about that: English is not my first language, and I feel like I sometimes unwillingly sound aggressive.
> awful
I think most people agree that such an ancient kernel is awful and can understand the comical take of that title. No where have I claimed their project is bad.
> So you just come and drop a huge PR that you haven't tested
I actually wrote a response to this in this thread, but the parent comment was deleted.
tl;dr I had actually compared it to match kernel, for the original Google Pixel, and fixed it like matching so it was actually quite likely to work.
> I think most people agree that such an ancient kernel is awful and can understand the comical take of that title.
I did not find it comical at all, and I thought you were a jerk. And I have read many messages from you in different places (HN, the /e/ forums, git repos, etc), and every single time, I think you are a jerk.
Also my post above has a score of +17 (honestly I never get that many upvotes here), so I wouldn't think that most people think your PR was comical.
You can choose to ignore this and keep believing that most people find you funny, or you can try to reflect on it and possibly improve your communication skills.
I don't really care, to be honest. I just wouldn't want to work with you given how you communicate online.
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Your PR was not ignored, and the author explained why they could not merge it as-is.
After your PR got closed you explained how to create the patchset from kernel.org sources which is the right approach, maybe that happened in other commits?
If it couldn't be merged as-is that is completely understandable, but why close it then? Why not say "can you tame this back?" instead the response was "this will break things and maybe you added malware".
First things first: I never implied (or wanted to imply) that you were introducing malware in that patchset, just that you could introduce it and I wouldn't be able to find that in a PR so big. Sorry if that came out wrong.
Still, that 3.18.140 kernel is ancient, it's not worth doing anything with it unless we find a bug that prevents something from working. Especially since there _is_ a mainline effort, and there's a 6.0 based tree that has most of the things working already except for some bugs with the nand and audio.
And that's the reason why there hasn't been a new release lately, because I hadn't had a lot of time, and because I'm spending all my little remaining energy on trying to get the userspace working with mainline.
For those who may not know, the userspace acts as a sort of bridge between the baseband and the Pinephone, by proxying stuff between them (that's how you can hijack some things and implement voice calls and SMS). When moving to mainline, there's certain devices that cease to exist, some others needs adapting, and I'm taking the time to try and get openqti to be more flexible and out of the box support different audio settings for different models, different flash configurations (for those modems which don't have a dedicated user data partition etc)
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The project maintainer may not want to keep PRs open that are not acceptable as is.
There is zero functional difference between holding the PR open indefinitely (and many times follow-up just never happens) and closing the PR until changes are made and where a new PR is then opened.
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I'm happy to see things done right in the form of mainlining the necessary parts, but that takes _years_. Users shouldn't have to suffer with known security issues that have fixes readily available.
I've used this tool to support many dozens of end-of-life devices working well over the past six years, and it is even purpose-built for these Android/Qualcomm downstream kernels.
Maybe you could rework your process a bit, as a drive-by patchset with 400+ commits is not a great way to start a conversation. Some ideas:
- Open an issue or post to the project's mailing list, proposing the use of your tool.
- If you don't do so already, have your tool only apply patches to code that is actually compiled for the target, e.g. give it a .config and trace which source files are used in make.
- Obtain the hardware for the devices your tool supports and donate your time to test the changes generated by your tool.
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