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Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

> It still has at least bare minimum support for MTE at a hardware level. We think they removed most of the hardware acceleration from the CPU cache to save money. They ruined the performance so it ended up being fully disabled in firmware. It may still be usable.

MTE but slow

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Pixel 11 still has no support for MTE. Our original post is accurate and the information is still relevant. A release of Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 for the Pixel 11 shipped after we made our post. It did not invalidate our post and what we said remains accurate. It added partial firmware support for MTE which shows there's hardware support for it. That was a possibility covered by our original post.

Pixel 11 still doesn't have software or firmware support for MTE. It only has a Beta release of the firmware with incomplete firmware support for it. It isn't clear if it has fully working hardware support. Our hope is that it does and that we can support it in December 2026. We could likely get the incomplete firmware support working for what we need but it wouldn't be ideal and we would have no guarantee it would not be removed in a future update. We don't yet know that there's nothing known to be wrong with the hardware support which could be why MTE is unavailable.

Since then, the Pixel 11 has also missed the update to Android 17 QPR1 and doesn't have the 2026-09-05 patch level due to not receiving the September 2026 updates to the firmware, kernel, kernel drivers, userspace drivers and many HAL components for September 2026. That's a serious problem itself. The update situation needs to be sorted out in addition to full support for MTE being added to the firmware.

"We think", followed by a quite fueled accusation.

It has no MTE right now, okay. Is there any evidence on the rest?

Dude, we know Google is out to get us, all of us. Start from there and everything else follows.

The information we provided in our post about MTE is accurate. Pixel 11 does not support MTE in either firmware or software. It's not known to what extent it's supported in hardware beyond that it appears to work fine with the partial MTE support in the Beta firmware. The Beta firmware wasn't yet available when we made our post and still lacks the full set of functionality. It's enough for testing it which we've done. It would be possible for GrapheneOS to use it if it ships in December 2026 as part of Android 17 QPR2 but it isn't known that it will happen. We would need to work around the incomplete support for it which is clearly only meant for testing.

Google has gone through years of cost cutting via mass layoffs, buyouts and driving away many employees through ending remote work. It's not due to any shortage of money but rather maximizing profit at the expense of overall quality and security. Android has been heavily impacted by the cost cutting, especially the security team. There's a very visible impact through less frequent security updates, missed updates for Pixels including Android 17 QPR1 not shipping for the Pixel 11. If the reason for MTE not being available at launch is that they lacked resources to get a small amount of work done on the firmware and software to provide it, then that would heavily reinforce our point.

There has been news reporting with leaks showing they planned to cut MTE support to reduce the die size and save money but we don't think that's relevant yet. The cores aren't yet the planned custom cores and hopefully they'll have reversed the decision by then after seeing Apple's launch of MTE integration. Their leaked plans to remove it at a hardware level predate Apple's integration being publicly announced.

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