[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.

[fsflover]

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

You keep repeating this everywhere. Consider reading what a Librem 5 developer says instead, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943487

[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.

[kuhsaft]

Ah. I see. So the blobs are loaded into the separate microprocessors. Either way, it's the same as pretty much any modern phone, where the modem (and other secondary processors) are running some proprietary firmware and is communicating with the OS processor.

I don't see how it's different from running a free open-source ASOP OS. On the mainstream Android devices, the wireless hardware is also isolated and communication is done via IOMMU.

There's some debate as to whether using the USB stack for communication to the modem in the Librem 5 is less secure than IOMMU as well.

[juliangoldsmith]

No true Scotsman would ever use binary blobs.