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Comment by wpwpwpw | Hacker News Reader

There's this years long quest to keep old phones alive, which is amazing (i'm myself using lineageos). But what are the odds of doing the crazy stuff people at asahi are doing with mX macs? There are absolutely no drivers for that hardware, and they are building everything from the ground up. Of course it's a huge amount of work given the considerable amount of different chipsets, cameras... but am I dumb to believe there would be a lot less work to upgrade no new generations of the same chipset? Aaand would it be less secure?

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There are some people doing that, it takes a ton of work and the device will probably be dead by the time you are finished. Some links in the articles section here:

https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile

So for phone stuff there's a lot of things going on, but for repurposing CPUs for other stuff... my understanding is that none of these phones are actually really capable of running consistently and basically just burn up and break if you try to put serious consistent load on them.

I mean it makes sense in a way, but all of this stuff seems to be built for very bursty behavior

mX macs are the future - you are guaranteed that there will be future generations of laptops sold in the millions(?) using at least some of this hardware. So the huge amount of work is probably going to be worth it.

Legacy phone hardware... harder to justify.

I understand that, however I'm still not very convinced (obviously not saying it's not a huge amount of work) for the reasons in my other reply in this thread. Thanks for your answer and sorry for my ignorance!

No chances, because there's just too much hardware to support.

The only real chance is to get behind brands like Faiphone.

Fairphone 3 and 4 have broken bootloaders that trust test-keys for Android Verified Boot: https://forum.fairphone.com/t/bootloader-avb-keys-used-in-ro...

And they have similar limitations to what I do here with regards to firmware support, as they offer longer support than Qualcomm actually does for these chips used.

The only devices with proper aftermarket OS support and five years of updates are the Google Pixel 6 and 7 series.

Sorry for my ignorance, but take, for example, Qualcomm chipsets, which are used in millions and millions of devices. There are 5 main series (2,4,6,7,8), a maximum of 9 generations for a total of 33 variations. I understand that 33 variations are a lot, but don't they share a lot of code? Apple Silicon has, at the moment, 5 variations in 2 generations (M1, M1Pro, M1Max, M1 Ultra and M2), and this number is going to grow quickly. Then we also have MESA drivers, which support, for example on NVIDIA, dozens of GPUs on a variety of architectures. I am getting this totally wrong? Is the effort that much greater than, for example, those projects? Is a Snapdragon 429 that much different from a 630, 665, a 750g or a 845? Apologies for so much text and thanks a lot for your answers!

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