Re: Project Halium : collaboration on common android base
On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 6:54 PM, JBB wrote:
> That’s right, but it’s the only way to run glibc based systems on android
> mobile phones, without rewriting everything which would take longer than the
> phone’s live.
This approach just seems like giving up to me.
> Halium will probably maintain a small repo for a PoC build
Are these proprietary drivers and firmware blobs legally
redistributable by Halium? I would have thought that they range
between GPL violations and not distributable by anyone other than
Google or hardware vendors.
> Please note that libhybris itself is free software, which could be included
> in debian without any license problems (the source package).
It may be free but there are no free Android drivers, so there isn't
much point in it, except maybe for reverse engineering purposes, which
isn't something that needs packages.
> Of course it’s a dream of all of us to use the mainline kernel on phones,
> but this is not realistic until Qualcomm themselves starts to opensource
> and mainline their stuff.
Sony are already upstreaming support for their devices, so it isn't
unrealistic that more vendors will eventually come around to working
with mainline Linux.
https://developer.sonymobile.com/open-devices/
I'd steer clear of Qualcomm phones anyway, IIRC Replicant developers
found the proprietary baseband has significant control over the CPU
and other parts of the phone, making them a security nightmare.
> Again, as this kernels would include proprietary blobs
That sounds like they are GPL violations that would be illegal for
both Halium and Debian to distribute. Is Halium really intending to
violate the Linux kernel license?
> That’s indeed a long term aim of halium too, but it’s not realistic now. We
> want to quickly support more devices, so that developers can build images
> based on different distros like debian for their phones and tablets. What
> you suggest would simply take way too long, or would be impossible.
Developers have been able to do this for a long time. I personally did
it back in 2012 and found the results to be pretty pointless. Even
users are able to do similar things now with the chroot-on-Android
tools.
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2012/12/03/debian-mobile/
https://wiki.debian.org/ChrootOnAndroid
> That would probably be comparable to the raspberry pi debian bootstrapping
> script which downloads the required stuff, builds the raspberrypi specific
> kernel and puts everything into a flashable image.
That is no longer needed, because RPi folks put in the effort to write
open drivers and get them upstreamed. Now you can run plain Debian on
RPi, except for the boot blob, but there is an open bootloader being
worked on too.
https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware
http://crna.cc/b/11
--
bye,
pabs
https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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