[bigiain]

Baseband, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth seem like things that should not work in this context (either as a cluster in a data center, or for an old device I want to repurpose in my home lab).

Is there anything that typically _requires_ vendor blobs to let a phone run as a usb ethernet connected linux-ish node? So no camera, screen/touchscreen, wifi/bt/cellular radios, gps, nfc/rfid, or stuff like that?

I know RasPi relies or (or perhaps used to rely on?) some Broadcomm blog to boot - from memory something to do with getting the GPU to boot/configure before booting the cpu(s). I could easily see Samsung or Huawei intentionally building something like that - or ending up like that because the rushed and half assed the design and engineering.

[numpad0]

Backlights, battery, anything. Modern high performance CPUs need an external debug adapter to set up the board before they can be powered on(old supercomputers did too). Blobs running on a less-modern CPU handles that. The less modern CPU in RasPi is its GPU, but it can be other devices; it can be the modem, or a "security" sub-CPU.

IMO it's possible that the bigger issue is no one knows what's going on inside these devices. Maybe some of blobs aren't needed, or they can be readily replaced, etc., but no one has time to deal with it. This is probably a field that cheap brain-hours that LLMs just created could actually revolutionize.

[jurgenburgen]

If you read the linked article they throw away everything except the motherboard from the phones.

[numpad0]

Doesn't really matter.

[d3Xt3r]

My comment was in context of GP's comment, not in the context of TFA. GP said:

> But... if Google can do so if handed a random pile of old phones, then why would a consumer not be given the same option for their phones?

In this instance, Baseband/WiFi/Bluetooth is very much relevant.