Flashing

openmoko at elude.in openmoko at elude.in
Thu Aug 22 18:29:39 UTC 2019


> I disagree in the case of phones: smartphones with separate application
> and baseband processors (like Openmoko) did not exist until 2007 or so,
> back in the late 1990s and early 2000s we all happily used dumbphones
> which had just one processor inside (very similar to our beloved Calypso)
> and which performed just basic telephony functions (make and receive
> calls, send and receive SMS) without any smarts.  I simply continue to
> live my life the same way how everyone else lived 15 y ago or so, using
> dumbphones instead of smartphones, and will continue living this way until
> the day I die.

It is unrealistic to expect everyone to go back 15y ago phone-wise, I
respect it that you do but "smart" phones are a thing now and smartphone
users should demand free basebands and further generation G's to be free
so this isn't a problem. We however don't live in such a society and
everyone just accepts everything without thinking.

> The Pirelli DP-L10 phone which I use currently is proprietary indeed,
> but:
>
>
> 1) It has the exact same Calypso chipset inside as my desired but not
> yet built dream phone, so I *can* run my own code on this phone to a
> limited extent, I can backup and restore its flash etc.
>
> 2) Pirelli's proprietary fw is based on the same TCS211 starting point
> from TI as Openmoko and FreeCalypso, thus wherever they left things
> unchanged from TI, we have the freedom to hack.  Pirelli's fw still uses
> TI's RVTMUX interface and freely exposes it on the phone's
> built-in USB-serial port, so we can connect to it, Pirelli's debug trace
> output is unchanged from TI, so we can parse and read it, their flash file
> system format is unchanged from TI, so we can parse and understand flash
> dumps, and they even support TI's TMFFS2 protocol over their exposed
> RVTMUX, so we can manipulate their file system
> "in vivo" with our fc-fsio tool.  All of these qualities are the
> reasons why I use this Pirelli DP-L10 as opposed to any random proprietary
> phone.

So in your eyes is the gta02 proprietary because you can't do those things
on it?

> What makes you think that it no longer applies?  The first sentence
> which says that moko13 was made in order to bring OM devices up to date
> with recent FC developments is a historical fact: the year was 2017, we
> had successfully built our own FreeCalypso modem hw product (FCDEV3B), we
> had our current FC Magnetite fw built for the fcdev3b target, but the
> latest fw for the gtamodem target was still the ancient-by-then
> leo2moko-r1 aka moko12 from 2013 - hence the moko13 release was made to
> bring the gtamodem target up to date.
>
> The second sentence in that change log entry refers to the other
> historical fact that back when Openmoko-Inc existed, they treated their
> modem fw as proprietary, zealously guarded their source, and did not allow
> people like me anywhere near.  The people whom they did hire to work on
> their firmware behind NDA castle walls were nowhere near as good as me,
> hence their firmware sucked.  The liberation of the formerly proprietary
> Calypso modem fw happened in 2013, by that time
> Om-Inc no longer existed, and their last fw release from 2009 (moko11)
> had been aged 4 y with no maintenance or support.
>
> Right at the time of the liberation back in 2013, I made the
> leo2moko-r1 aka moko12 release which was basically a clean recompilation
> (moko11 was miscompiled in that it contained some stale
> objects which didn't get recompiled to account for shifted enum constants -
> they changed a header file, but there was no make depend and they forgot
> to recompile some objects) with just two of the worst bogons (the rfcap
> bogosity and AT at SC) removed.  Then it took me another 3 y period from 2013
> till 2016 during which I tried some failed approaches before I finally
> came up with what I named FC Magnetite, which is our current unified
> source tree in which all development happens and from which we make builds
> for different targets.  What I was basically saying in that change log
> entry is that our current development model based on the FC Magnetite Hg
> repository and multi-target build system is a far cry from the proprietary
>  development model employed by Om-Inc when that company existed.

I was confused there because the fw source was released by you and
technically OM wasn't proprietary (secret) anymore because you released
the source they withheld.

> * Moko13 was the last release built with the legacy 2007 blob version
> of the G23M protocol stack.  When OM got their firmware baseline delivery
> from TI, they got this G23M PS component in binary-only form, and at the
> present time there exists no surviving copy of the corresponding source
> for that 2007 G23M PS version, so it is binary sans source.  Around 2018
> we made the switch to the new hybrid config in FreeCalypso, and this
> hybrid config is built using a newer 2009 version of the G23M PS (a
> version which OM never got - we got it from a different source), and this
> newer version came as 100% genuine C source from the beginning.  It took
> us till 2018 before we could switch our production fw to this new version
> because hybridizing this newer PS version with the solid TCS211 chipsetsw
> foundation was a very non-trivial accomplishment, and it took us that long
> to shake the bugs out.

Is something proprietary if it's compiled using binary-only compiler even
if it's released as free software?

> It basically comes down to which version you would rather run: a
> version built by IP zealots who cared more about copyright and NDA
> compliance than about technical quality, or a version built by a
> professional GSM engineer who works transparently in the open.

Is there any IP left in OM's last release which wasn't published by you?

> Hmm, I suppose I could buy a small batch of cables from Sysmocom and
> then resell them in a non-Paypal-requiring way.  Would you be willing to
> give me your snail mail address so I could send you a cable?  Would you be
> able and willing to reimburse me for it via Bitcoin?

I'll consider it.

> Also if you send me anything off-list using one of your anonymous Tor
> email providers, I may not receive it - right now all I have is Gmail, I do
> NOT have the energy at the moment to set up a better email system
> (if you wanna change this situation, you would need to make a big
> donation toward the cost of my SRS - that would be the only thing that can
> sufficiently motivate me in my present circumstances), and Gmail seems to
> seriously dislike your current elude.in setup - your post to which I am
> replying never showed up in my inbox, I can only see it via the Pipermail
> archive on the freecalypso.org mailing list server.

I'll send you something with different providers, reply if receive anything.

> I am deeply philosophically against distro packagers, and I only
> support people who compile and install FC host tools directly from the
> official source tarball, not via any third-party packages.  If you use a
> version that has been messed with by those people whom I don't approve of,
> you are on your own and I won't provide any support as a matter of
> principle.  Why can't you just download the official source tarball, cd
> into it, run 'make' and then 'make install' like we all used to do for
> many decades before those gawddamn packaging things were invented?

That's the thing with Guix, they compile directly from source, no
traditional package maintainers needed. See here for fc-host-tools:
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/embedded.scm#n978

It is unrealistic to expect everyone to go back 25y ago distro-wise and
compile everything from source, I respect it that you do but distro
packagers are a thing now and distro users should demand a single package
solution across all distros so fragmentation isn't a problem. Guix is the
closest solution we have right now.



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