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Comment by zlatan_todoric | Hacker News Reader

While the Librem5 is step into right direction, it is far away from open hardware and will likely need even software proprietary bits - so I would recommend to stay in realistic zone and help the project in any way you can.

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From their manifesto:

> The Corporation will release all software written by The Corporation under a free software license.

> The Corporation will release all hardware schematics authored by The Corporation under a free hardware license.

If you are talking about the IP blocks that are bought/licensed from third parties, then you are right, but I suppose that these are replaceable by equivalent blocks in future versions, without the user noticing. In other words, users don't depend on these blocks, so for all the user knows, these blocks are commodities.

I know the manifesto, I am among original ones proposing it.

And for things that might happen in future, I would leave them for future. Building hw takes time and proper dedication - all what I am saying is to be realistic towards current situation. The blocks are no commodities but some essential parts in today's use of smartphones. And no, things don't move that fast that you will just replace it.

If done right, things could finally go into right direction or at least have some new light on it.

> software proprietary bits

Only the DDR4 memory training blob (which someone could eventually rewrite).

Where are they getting the LTE baseband software from?

They're not of course. They just treat the modem as walled off peripheral black box like all the other rest of the hardware. They may load firmware on boot for LTE/Wifi/Bluetooth like most Linux laptops do. Depending on your opinion on the topic that may be free enough or not but it should be safe as none of those can access the CPU/RAM directly.

I see. The question here is not if there will be proprietary software: there will be. The question is which of that proprietary software runs on the CPU.

Is the idea that all of the software in the kernel to interface with these devices is open source?

I also don’t get the hangup over PCIe (vs USB). DMA with an IOMMU can be made fairly secure (and has obvious perf benefits).

I think the main reason is that powering off a device (for their hardware kill switches) connected via USB is more reliable than powering off a device connected via PCIe.

There's also just more layers of security when using USB as opposed to a single layer with PCIe (IOMMU -- which is secure as far as I know but I'd prefer to be safe rather than sorry in this case).

That makes sense.

I thought of the kill switch thing after commenting… eGPUs (necessarily) have the ability to be unplugged while running, but I think it was a lot of work on the part of the OSes to make that work well.

What would be a benefit to putting the modems on PCIe bus? I don’t see any positives, only drawbacks.

Besides IOMMU bugs, which silicon vendors often subtly add to their errata too much for my comfort; an IOMMU adds security against DMA attacks in theory. I specifically say in theory because oftentimes vendors either don't configure it correctly or leave it totally unconfigured. Additionally, things like multiplexing on the same bus further complicates things

It depends on the board design. It costs more, but you can have controlled power line for a single device, controllable with a gpio.

Edit: it has a "radio hardware killswitch" ; so it's well designed.

> I see. The question here is not if there will be proprietary software: there will be. The question is which of that proprietary software runs on the CPU.

I'm pretty sure no closed source software runs on the CPU. As for the hardware that depends on your definition. Hardware often has firmware in ROM. That you now feed that firmware on bootup instead of it being in ROM just allows you to update the firmware from the manufacturer. If that's running proprietary software depends on your definition.

Reminds me of a joke I heard:

What’s the difference between a person and a cellphone?

A person only has two arms.

They don't have the baseband on the same chip, the modem is connected over something like USB (and there's probably gonna be a physical kill switch).

IIRC this is fine even under FSF "Respects your Freedom" rules

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