On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 11:12:21AM +1000, Michael Verrenkamp wrote:
The folks over at Purism are crowd funding a new mobile phone. It isn't entirely Libre but it is a lot better than the vast majority of android phones available.
Runs GNU/Linux distros, not android and the user is free to install their own. Hardware switches for main elements including the base-band processor
https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
It is an ambitious project and is being a little over sold as Purism tend to do but it is a good direction to move in.
Michael
At face value, this is a gooood project. Computers tend to have proprietary drivers that you can replace, maybe you can run Trisquel if you're lucky. Phones, not so. Even a phone running Replicant has to kill the GPU stack and go without Wi-Fi or GPS. The closest thing to a free phone at the moment is a toss-up between the Dragonbox Pyra mobile edition gaming console, the Neo900 and GTA04, so I'll compare it to those. For $800 AUD you can get the GTA04 if it's in stock, the Neo900 is off in the mid-$1K range, Pyra mobile is around $1.1K to preorder, this is roughly $800 AUD The GTA04 and Neo900 both require GPU drivers for acceleration and Wi-Fi firmware, the Pyra requires additionally GPU firmware which isn't great. All three use PowerVR graphics which aren't anywhere close to being reverse engineered or open sourced. The Librem 5 is choosing between the i.MX6 board and the i.MX8. The i.MX6 is also used by the Novena and as such I've been following and dogfooding the GPU situation- you're not going to be able to run games with this driver. I'm not even sure if compositing would work well, using Wayland was slow. This is just my experience though. I do worry that proprietary drivers won't work. I know with the Novena the drivers wouldn't work even if the developers tried. The kernel module that the proprietary drivers use also tended to corrupt RAM and crash the system, and looks to be an (unintentionally?) obfuscated mess. However, software rendering might be able to get something usable. At least on GNU/Linux with X11. The Replicant folks have been trying to use software rendering for their phones and it's currently unoptimized and slow. Video playback with software rendering is doable with etnaviv though, which is a great step up from watching videos at 20fps. That said, etnaviv on a bad day is better than software rendering on the other devices. But it's probably worse than proprietary GPU drivers, and I do worry if those will be available on the phone. Nobody likes slow devices, and unfortunately having latency when doing hand gestures on a touch screen is double unfun. Having free Wi-Fi would be FANTASTIC given how all the phones running the Broadcom firmware are able to be remotely rooted at the moment. The GTA04 / Neo900 don't use Broadcom. Unsure about about the Pyra. The lower end Pyra packs at least 2GiB RAM, with the Neo900 at 1GiB and GTA04 at 512 MiB. As far as I'm concerned I've compiled entire Linux systems on 2GiB of RAM, so 3GiB 3GiB seems good enough for the Librem. Modem isolation is good too, but that's true with all these projects. That's not to say this isn't a killer feature! ALL of the phones sitting on my desk right now have 'bad' to 'unproven to be bad' modem isolation status. Nice! I do wonder what they're going to do modem-wise. Sure it's isolated but you'll need a free RIL and GPS layer for communication since that's where GPS lives. I'll assume that they have this figured out, much like the other projects. I have seen Todd bounce around IRC asking about Etnaviv maybe a year or so ago, so this has been at least thought about for a while. Though they do have this disclaimer: "From testing the CPU, GPU, Bootloader and all software will run free software, we are evaluating the WiFi and Bluetooth chips and firmware, this is an area we have to evaluate, finalize, and test. The mobile baseband will most likely use ROM loaded firmware, but a free software kernel driver. We intend to invest time and money toward freeing any non-free firmware." I'll talk about this a bit more later. As with all the other phone projects, there's an open source bootloader. This means you can run actual GNU/Linux systems, or BSD, or Windows NT if you decided you wanted more pain than Android. I'm assuming Pyra's bootloader is free since it's still in development. Like the other phones, it seems to be designed to last a while. This shows through having removable components like the battery, board, and includes a debug interface! When you want to do some hacking, you're going to want all of these. Perhaps a bit of a shallow thing to get excited for, but to get a debug interface for my Samsung Galaxy S2 it involves hacking together a USB cable and UART connector to get a jig I can use for access. Last point I personally care about is the hardware license. Being open hardware is kind of a 'degrees of freedom' thing. The Novena is open hardware, as is the GTA04 and Neo900. The Pyra seems to be a 'we don't want commercial competitors' which is less open. Purism seems to have this statement: "Our intention is to have everything freed down to the schematic level, but have not cleared all design, patents, legal, and contractual details. We will continue to advance toward this goal as it aligns with our long-term beliefs." Nice, though it's not a promise. Ok, so that's my initial impression of what's on the table. The project promises a lot, and Purism has kind of a muddy history with this kind of thing- though they do seem intent on following up on their intents. They're still working to get rid of ME from their devices for example, and they're succeeding. I don't fully expect this phone to live up to all these promises, and I'm sure during the campaign we'll find some compromise. Assuming Purism can make an actual phone that's a little better than my 2011 Galaxy S2, as long as they give me GNU/Linux and modem isolation I may actually be sold. I've been hacking at Android for the past month on multiple devices and it's probably one of the worst technological experiences I've had. It's not developer friendly, it's not modification friendly, it's just meant to be middleware for whatever the phone vendor wants to ship. Purism's previous products like their laptop/tablet weren't particularly interesting to me but if even half of what they promise arrives this is probably going to be a net win for the FOSS community at large. Having a GNU/Linux phone OS that works well, having a somewhat cheaper but modern hackable device, pushing secure decentralized and sustainable protocols, having HTML5 and traditional Unix applications as an API instead of the proprietary Android toolchain... It would be great. Even if this flops due to the nature of open source this will probably benefit the existing open hardware projects too and help boost the ecosystem and interest in these technologies. Jookia.