I'm currently hacking a toy OS in Zig on the PinePhone, and I have to say the documentation is a bit painful, or sometimes just missing, for parts of these complex SoCs, and that is meant to be a fairly open platform.
But the modem binary blob is a whole other world, and I am not sure how they could tackle that, since my understanding is that this is partly done for carrier licensing reasons? ie. to avoid abuse on the cellular networks. So isn't an open source radio driver also going to have to be licensed in the same way, and then ultimately shared as another binary blob?
The PinePhone compromise seems to be 'isolating' the modem & blob at the end of a USB link. Although I'm not 100% sure how that works yet, since I only just got the graphics & fonts working.
But even that is a bit of a puzzler, since I'm currently framebuffer-to-lcd based, but I know there is a Mali GPU hiding somewhere. I suspect that will also involve another blob. Anyway, the framebuffer approach seems fine for now, it is booting in ~2s, and the less binary blobs involved the better.
It will be interesting to see what FSF can achieve. But, personally I think they would be better focusing on a fully open-hardware dumb phone, and build upon that.
But the modem binary blob is a whole other world, and I am not sure how they could tackle that, since my understanding is that this is partly done for carrier licensing reasons? ie. to avoid abuse on the cellular networks. So isn't an open source radio driver also going to have to be licensed in the same way, and then ultimately shared as another binary blob?
The PinePhone compromise seems to be 'isolating' the modem & blob at the end of a USB link. Although I'm not 100% sure how that works yet, since I only just got the graphics & fonts working.
But even that is a bit of a puzzler, since I'm currently framebuffer-to-lcd based, but I know there is a Mali GPU hiding somewhere. I suspect that will also involve another blob. Anyway, the framebuffer approach seems fine for now, it is booting in ~2s, and the less binary blobs involved the better.
It will be interesting to see what FSF can achieve. But, personally I think they would be better focusing on a fully open-hardware dumb phone, and build upon that.