Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

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This is a totally amazing project and I totally applaud their effort. Linux got it's big boost on x86 back in the 90s/2000s because the PC is an actual architecture. You're guaranteed so many standards on a BIOS or UEFI based PC.

The Fail0ver guys have a great talk about porting Linux to a PS4 and how it's an example of an x86_64 that is totally NOT a PC in any meaningful way.

Android is designed for devices where you solder random pins to random chips and hack a bunch of shit and blobs together to get it to boot. You can't install a fresh Android like you can Windows, and I think it's really held back Android as a long term, stable operating system.

Microsoft at least mandated UEFI+ARM, but their boot loaders are still locked even though their mobile platform is dead (come on Microsoft, you just bought Github. Throw as a bone and unlock your bootloaders or publish a key for them!). No mobile device uses Device Trees.

It would be great if you could take most popular old android devices and just run Linux on them, use them as a small Raspberry Pi like device. I think that's what Postmarket is doing to start with, but it looks like they're even progressing to getting phones really usable as phones in the future .. which is pretty damn exciting.

The android phones based on the 3.4+ kernels generally do use device trees but those are incompatible with the mainline ones since they depend on the large amount of patches in those kernels for the platform support.

Also didn't the uefi keys for the microsoft phones get leaked?

I do prefer regular Linux userlands to Android. However, with Project Treble (essentially a HAL), it's possible to produce ROMs that can be used on many devices thus replicating the experience mainline Linux gives (where the image is decoupled from particular hardware).

There are already some proofs of concept:

https://www.xda-developers.com/flash-generic-system-image-pr...

We would not even need the mainline kernel to decouple images from particular hardware. In postmarketOS we only have a hand full of device specific packages (ideally only one per device), and one of them is the downstream kernel for non-mainlined devices. All other binary packages can be shared between all devices of the same CPU architecture (in Alpine terms usually "armhf" or "aarch64" for mobile phones and tablets). Just like Linux distributions do it.

The big benefit of the mainline kernel is, that it is the only way to get all the (security) fixes. Greg Kroah-Hartman (Linux kernel who maintains the stable releases) wrote in Februrary:

> As proof of this, I demoed at the Kernel Recipes talk referenced above how trivial it was to crash all of the latest flagship Android phones on the market with a tiny userspace program. The fix for this issue was released 6 months prior in the LTS kernel that the devices were based on, however none of the devices had upgraded or fixed their kernels for this problem. As of this writing (5 months later) only two devices have fixed their kernel and are now not vulnerable to that specific bug.

Source: http://kroah.com/log/blog/2018/02/05/linux-kernel-release-mo...

This is the type of shit that gets me livid. It's crazy, how did we get here??? I don't think it's through malicious intent, but rather from digging in the dark so to speak and forceful proding for first to market or more simply, incompetent competitive market dynamics. The engineering teams that needed to make these devices didn't have a clear understanding of the kernels model, how it's all connected, where the edges are, how to make low cost additions. They got shoved forward to the edge, with someone shouting "deliver in 2 months or it's all over." So instead of learning how to make quality additions to the kenral, instead of building a more complete understanding, how the code was all connected, they just hacked some shit together to ship on time.

For all the good benefits of a competitive market system, the externalities such as the fracturing software systems is fustrating.

> how did we get here?

Planned obsolescence.

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