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I'm running 5.11 on it though.

from my experience porting cyanogenMOD from android phones that only received 2.3 officially all the way up to 4+, you are likely running the binary kernel drivers as binary blobs for 2.6 and some kid in a forum either flipped bits at random while following a asm tutorial or wrapped it in a syscall shell that emulates an old kernel to the driver.

or maybe the n900 had less esoteric peripherals than android phones. I don't know... as I never got my hands on one despite actively trying to buy one for a couple years when they were announced.

Your experience isn't very relevant to N900 then. It's a proper GNU/Linux device, the only closed driver blob was for the GPU.

Another PowerVR GPU for those that wonder. They quite notoriously don't have any open-source drivers.

There is a lot of information on the net why that's not the case, from the GPU architecture to source leaks. One could possibly make a shim to load older proprietary kernel modules, but it's hardly worth it: PowerVR GPUs don't seem to be used much nowadays, in contrast with Mali GPUs. And PowerVR GPUs seem to require quite different drivers depending on IP customization.

> One could possibly make a shim

That has been done already: https://github.com/openpvrsgx-devgroup

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