Comment by sznio
4 months ago
From my understanding of the article, Postmarket or Lineage or any other mobile operating system will be able to make use of this project. The goal is to provide FOSS drivers, so that you can run Lineage without proprietary blobs copied from the distribution of Android provided by the device manufacturer.
It's mainly a libre purity project. A Lineage user won't be able to tell a thing, but the system will be "ethically pure"
There aren't even any arm or x86 desktops that are completely blob free. There is some ridiculously expensive amd power hungry power9 thing that nothing will run on, and some of sifive's newer boards might qualify. Every arm at least has some soc blobs. And every x86 has something like ime. Going straight for a blob free phone seems like getting ahead of ourselves. How about we shoot for a completely free rpi usable on the desktop first?
Rockchip AFAIK doesn't have any. It boots with mainline u-boot, but it doesn't include any wifi or other radios.
It os definitely more open than most, thanks! I'm pretty sure it still has the masked boot rom before getting to the open bits. While the tpl and ddr are still blobs and might harbor naughtiness, people have at least figured out how to edit the blobs https://github.com/hbiyik/rkddr
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Also, libreboot supports quite a bit of hardware. What binary blobs are left of you have one of those systems?
> Postmarket or Lineage or any other mobile operating system will be able to make use of this project.
Any OS "is able" to use anything from any other OS - in theory and given infinite resources. In practice though, it makes a huge difference when something works by default.
No, software licensing often gets in the way.
How does the licensing affect firmware blobs?
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