[cogman10]

That's the depressing part. I keep looking for something I could potential run the likes of kde mobile and maybe waydroid on, but there's really just nobody doing this. You are basically locked into a vendor kernel if it's even available.

[kuhsaft]

People forget how much the mobile hardware industry relies on non-free infrastructure. Infrastructure developed by companies that make the standards. You really can't make a good open-source phone because you, pretty much, have to play by the rules of the companies in these consortiums.

[fsflover]

Except Librem 5 has been created and is usable by the HN people.

[handedness]

Does the Librem 5 not rely on any non-free code or infrastructure?

[kuhsaft]

It does. They obscure the usage of non-free hardware/firmware by not shipping it as part of the OS, but as a bundle on separate flash storage that is loaded into the OS by initrd. That blob is updatable as "firmware". The 100% free open-source is just marketing. It's just for the OS. A lot of the hardware and firmware is proprietary.

https://github.com/linuxboot/heads/blob/c859c28b88b7bc197c16...

https://forums.puri.sm/t/the-librem-5-blob-list/28815/26

[fsflover]

> The 100% free open-source is just marketing.

100% FLOSS is in the OS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25504641. It is not the end of the road, but this is the only phone that can run such OS.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943487

[TommyTran732]

It's basically taking the blobs that would be normally shipped with the OS in a sensible manner, shuffle it around, then calling it "free" while the same blobs would still be there, just on different flash storage chips.

[seba_dos1]

Depends where you draw the line. There is not a single non-free blob in the OS that runs there once the bootloader is up (unless you put some there by yourself, which you're of course free to do).

[kuhsaft]

I think you misunderstand what the Purism Firmware Jail is. I don't blame you though. They seem to make it purposefully misleading. It doesn't isolate what runs in the OS. It just isolates the OS updates from the non-free blob updates. The OS still runs the non-free blobs. It just loads it from separate flash.

https://github.com/linuxboot/heads/blob/c859c28b88b7bc197c16...

https://forums.puri.sm/t/the-librem-5-blob-list/28815/26

[seba_dos1]

It is you who is confused here. The first link is completely irrelevant to the Librem 5, and the second one points to a thread where the actual information present has been written by me.

The only non-free piece of code executed by the ARM Cortex-A53 cluster on the Librem 5 is the SoC's mask ROM bootloader. Once the control is passed to u-boot/ATF there is not a single non-free blob that runs there. Some peripherals may need blobs to be uploaded onto them to work, such as DP, DDRC and one of the used Wi-Fi cards (handled by ROM/u-boot/Linux respectively), while others boot from their own internal memories. Not all of those firmwares are non-free, but most are.

In the end, as I said earlier, the assessment depends on where you draw the line. I happen to draw it at the main CPU and the blobs that need to run within the user-controlled OS, which are unacceptable for me and which aren't present on the Librem 5.

[juliangoldsmith]

No true Scotsman would ever use binary blobs.