by enthdegree on 1/8/2025, 8:07:56 PM with 2 comments
Running a modern OS on virtually any off-the-shelf gadget using an ARM chipset is an unwinnable reverse-engineering fight: locked-down chainloaded boot processes, binary blob drivers, mystery meat SoCs with no public documentation, abandonment by the vendor N years ago, etc. Practically the only OS that such a device can run is whatever it was shipped with: often an ancient Linux stack where only in a good case is the source available, and even then it's typically so far from mainline there's no hope to get something newer running. This makes these devices profoundly less useful in diverse ways.
There doesn't seem to be sufficient market incentive to move in a positive direction: Alpine and PostmarketOS' tempered victory with only a limited set of devices seems like evidence of how direly difficult it is to independently get a modern kernel running on a chipset. Even ostensibly-community-friendly devices like those from Pine64 are only marginally usable after years of enormous, thankless pro-bono effort by really capable people. It would have been prohibitively expensive to pay developers to do that work, Pine64 claims. For examples of how their strategy is not working see the current state of their phones and tablets, Pine64's "Setting the Record Straight" blog post + the surrounding discourse.
It seems there is un-restrained market incentive to keep devices as closed-source as they are: open documentation + standardization are expensive and uncommon, and moving machines to be less ephemeral = people buy fewer gadgets = less $$$. Vendors burn efuses on SoCs that cause the bootloader to refuse to jump to code that doesn't match a signature. From a more superficial angle, there are 6 official "connect your phone to your Bose gadget" programs in the App Store. It is a cosmic truth that no matter the situation things could always get unimaginably worse.
- Maybe this is a completely uninformed/surface-level take. Anyone want to call me out on stuff I got wrong?
- Is there any hope the market will eventually correct itself?
- Is there any meaningful way to providing support towards correction that doesn't just further encourage the current brokenness?
There doesn't seem to be sufficient market incentive to move in a positive direction: Alpine and PostmarketOS' tempered victory with only a limited set of devices seems like evidence of how direly difficult it is to independently get a modern kernel running on a chipset. Even ostensibly-community-friendly devices like those from Pine64 are only marginally usable after years of enormous, thankless pro-bono effort by really capable people. It would have been prohibitively expensive to pay developers to do that work, Pine64 claims. For examples of how their strategy is not working see the current state of their phones and tablets, Pine64's "Setting the Record Straight" blog post + the surrounding discourse.
It seems there is un-restrained market incentive to keep devices as closed-source as they are: open documentation + standardization are expensive and uncommon, and moving machines to be less ephemeral = people buy fewer gadgets = less $$$. Vendors burn efuses on SoCs that cause the bootloader to refuse to jump to code that doesn't match a signature. From a more superficial angle, there are 6 official "connect your phone to your Bose gadget" programs in the App Store. It is a cosmic truth that no matter the situation things could always get unimaginably worse.
- Maybe this is a completely uninformed/surface-level take. Anyone want to call me out on stuff I got wrong?
- Is there any hope the market will eventually correct itself?
- Is there any meaningful way to providing support towards correction that doesn't just further encourage the current brokenness?