Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

such colossal public good.

kind of weird to me that we still have so few phones that have started running mainline. there's a lot of postmarketOS phones, but my understanding is they Helium/libhybris which mixes in a ton of the Android support infrastructure/drivers to do the job. i could be overly concerned, but there being so few distributions & such specific distributions targeting phones is exactly the good this work OUGHT to be unlocking, & it just seems like progress in making that happen is disorganized / not really happening, alas alas alas.

getting a toe-hold in, where we start to see self-determinism on what our devices run, would be such a compelling & powerful vision. i really hope we can start to see that!

ubuntu touch targets the Pixel3. i'd be curious to know what they did. PinePhone & Purism really took it from the top, have their own hardware that starts in a more easy-to-work with set up. but I don't see why that would be required to get a decent regular linux distro (arch, debian) running on a phone, with a gui (sans many device drivers!).

because when someone goes out of the way to give us a phone with mainline and a qwerty physical keyboard like we have been asking for ages, nobody buys and they go bankrupt?

https://www.gsmarena.com/blackberry_key2-9187.php

:)

Essential did the same thing with the PH-1. I think Google has been trying, and with their own SoC, maybe they will finally be able to accomplish this goal.

A) Until your comment, I didn't even know this existed. That's a massive marketing failure.

B) Most Chinese smartphones dump all over this with the exception of the keyboard--which comes in for all sorts of grief for being crap. You had one job Blackberry ...

The Key2 does not run a mainline kernel, and the bootloader is locked down so you cannot run your own kernel or OS. This is not the phone "we have been asking for".

Last time I looked, few pmos devices used libhybris. They're mostly downstream kernels with no GPU acceleration, though they're getting progressively mainlined.

Mainlined phones generally try to leverage OSS drivers where possible.

Some of the better-supported pmOS devices are running mainline, such as the OnePlus 6.

right! thanks! i forgot about the oneplus6 & it's progress!

figuring out how to get a kernel & normal environment booting seems to be one of the biggest challenges.

there is a TianoCore EDK2 porting effort underway that seems to have support on a good number of phones. who knows what works & doesn't once you are able to start running your own mainline kernel, but way cool to see over a dozen phones on this list! genuinely excited to have some 3(+) year old phones (mostly now unsupported, insecure, or about to be!) to start to get to play with!!

this could well be a flagship demonstration of what a Right to Repair can do: save a lot of devices the landfill, prove very enduringly useful to people, once they have some self-determinism with their purchases. ad astra emptor.

https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-sdm845

There's also https://www.somainline.org focusing on SDM630/660, I'm pretty sure they have Freedreno working on these SoCs, unfortunately so far pmOS isn't adopting their latest kernel work all that quickly (?)

How would a Linux phone be wrt security? I just had my iphone stolen, don't have to worry too much about data loss because it's unlikely somebody will crack into it.

I don't think that's true for Android, but I'm not sure about Linux phones.

A first step would be to do the same thing on your Linux phone as you'd do on a Linux desktop or laptop, encrypt the storage.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Encrypting_an_enti...

However, the difference of course is that with a desktop especially and also with a laptop if you are actually careful with the security of your data, is that you generally turn them off when you are not using them, so that they don't sit unprotected with the encryption keys in RAM, and they are unlikely to be stolen while you are using them.

A phone, on the other hand, is probably turned on 24/7.

But really, if someone is ready to extract the storage encryption keys of your phone from its RAM, those same people will probably snatch your laptop out of your hands while you are using it and it's unlocked.

So as long as you are able to encrypt the storage of the phone with LUKS, I think you shall have nothing to worry about with most phone thieves.

OTOH, having the storage completely unencrypted I think even the regular low-level criminals may decide to snoop on your data. At least if it's an SD card that you can just pop into a computer. But then again, neither Windows nor macOS read any of the common Linux filesystems out of the box. So probably even without encryption most thieves would not get to your data unless they were specifically motivated to go for it, and in which case as mentioned they might as well snatch your laptop (or your iPhone) from out of your hands when it's booted and unlocked.

Also anyone compitent enough to do that likely has better options available than stealing phones

that would depend on what the practitioners imagine & build for themselves as ideal security regimes, wouldn't it?

we can build exactly whatever we want! wanna run Tails on your phone? go for it. that should be secure.

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