• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’ve worked with Qualcomm SoCs a long time ago and, from my experience, the binary blobs ARE the biggest hurdle to the true Foss phone. Google is the most to blame, IMO, but also the rest of traditional OEMS of SoCs. They basically found the way to circumvent the OSS nature of Linux, which is why even though android is based on linux, the actual product and ecosystem looks nothing like regular Linux. What Google allowed with Android architecture, particularly with their HAL subsystem is force a layer in between native Linux device interface and Android system, so OEMs use that to implement whatever proprietary peripheral (device, sensor, etc) purely in userspace, rather that just as a kernel module. The kernel module is then just a userspace/kernelspace adapter, and everything is handled in the user space. This then means you dont have to have an open source driver, as it is not a part of kernel, and you just lock your driver into a binary blob. And in case of Qualcomm and I assume other oems, everything is just a binary blob. All sensors, microphone, GPS, modem, EVERYTHING. Yes, you can boot a basic Linux kernel, but no other functionality will work. If you had access to the blob source, you’d be able to fix, update and use a newer kernel versions eventually. HAL is technically not the cause of the problem, but it’s certainly an inspiration and almost a blueprint for how to lock down your hardware.


  • A lot of my development experience is actually about handling people. Both management and other developers. Ego is indeed a big problem. I wish my job would be just programming/designing/debugging/testing, but this is not the nature of most of the jobs. Instead it is managing expectations, estimations, negotiating specs, features, explaining what is realistic, what is not, what is possible and what is not and why. It gets tiring quickly and is also thankless as often arrogant people who aren’t actually helpful or working in the best interest of the company get mistaken for rock stars and get to do even more damage you need to fix. You also need to deal with that from time to time.




  • Oh, great, my country is in the news again. Oh, wait, it’s bad news, again. Here’s some better news: the students have blocked all the universities and other people are joining the protests in hopes of overthrowing the authoritarian regime. The corruption has reached peak levels and is actually killing people. The government is doing it’s best to stay in power, but no real, mass violence has been applied just yet. People have given up on elections because they are demonstrably fixed and can’t change anything. I don’t know how this will end.