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Comment by worldsavior | Hacker News Reader

https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm

That comparison shows "Deblobbed? Yes" for GrapheneOS. That implies they've replaced (most of) the blobs for wifi, bluetooth, 5g chips etc.

Is that actually true? It's such a big deal, and I see little to no work being done on this front.

Anyone have any idea what GrapheneOS actually deblobbed?

They can because they essentially support Google chipsets, which are not blobby like MediaTek or Qualcomm because Google for all its faults is still relatively open (except their recent change in release schedules is why the Pixel 10 series still only has experimental GrapheneOS support).

Do you claim that there's a place where I can find datasheets for peripheral devices for Google Pixel? Like GPU, etc.

No, but they used to publish the source code for the drivers as part of AOSP. Now they no longer publish the device trees. Check out GrapheneOS' other Mastodon posts for the gory details.

Here’s an example of the radio firmware and vendor blobs required for a pixel 9 pro XL build: https://github.com/TheMuppets/proprietary_vendor_google_komo...

Nobody, including Graphene, is getting away with building their own modem firmware. The reduced blobs are on userspace and some HAL components.

Yes, even Apple with its practically infinite resources took 14 years from when it acquired Infineon's mobile chipset unit to launching its C1 modem. So much of the telcos' allegedly open protocols are actually implementation-dependent that it takes a lot of testing on actual mobile networks to validate interop.

> took 14 years

It was at most 4 years. Intel was the one that bought them 14 years ago and divested most of the IP off to Apple 6 years ago: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/07/apple-to-acquire-the-...

It's nowhere near that. Pretty sure even modules are signed by Google.

Nice! Thanks for the link. I noticed they didn't mention MOCOR OS (for the new Nokia 3210), but then I remembered that that's not an Android version. I'll see if they can add it somewhere else.

Unrelated, but this led me to find gnuclad, which may be somewhat externally maintained and is used to create the cladogragms.

This is a great resource! Thanks

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