Replicant

I'm copying and pasting GNUtoo's response to a very similar question from the email list: https://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/replicant/2019-June/001981.html

Please let us know if this answers your question.

My understanding is replicant can run on any android phone.
Correct?

Add support for a device in Replicant requires to have the very basic features working in Replicant without Replicant having to ship nonfree software.

So for many Android phones, getting to that point would require a lot of work, whereas for some other phones that are not very different from the ones already supported by Replicant it's probably not a huge amount of work.

The reason why replicant is only available for a few old phones is because you have a modem isolation requirement about replicant.

It's because the project tried to add support for phones like the GTA04 that have free software booloaders.

This port was to use a kernel that is closely based on upstream Linux, and at the time the Replicant port failed because it required more time than we had at the time. Now, the amount of work to use an upstream kernel is way lower.

After that there was also an attempt to first port the LG Optimus black to the upstream kernel and u-boot, for then adding support for it in Replicant but that also took quite a lot of time, so that device was still added upstream in u-boot with some support in Linux but, it probably still lacks an upstream display driver for instance.

So as everybody were busy working in that direction, nobody worked to add support for more recent devices.

Does the pinephone meet the modem isolation requirement about replicant?

Assuming that they will also use an EC25 modem, like they did in the prototypes, I think it could easily meet such requirements.

On the prototypes, the modem was connected through USB.

So, good modem isolation here is probably just a matter of configuration either within the kernel, or through something like usbguard, if it's possible to run it on Android, to make sure that the modem cannot become a keyboard and take control of Replicant.

If that is the case and the pinephone becomes a functioning phone of quality, I see no reason why replicant should not make the pinephone a priority.

What I was pointing out was that we are working to port Replicant to Android 9, with some of the phones we currently support on Replicant 6.

So if that goes well, that work would most probably be reusable with the PinePhone with minimal effort. However since the PinePhone modem is different, we will need to look into it to understand how much work would be required to add support for that modem.

Some preliminary work has already been done to support the Galaxy SIII 4G modem, which uses the QMI protocol.

I've not looked deep enough into it to know what is the best approach in supporting that modem protocol, but if that work is advanced enough, adding support for that protocol might also be done faster by using the Galaxy SIII 4G to do it.

It's also very difficult to know in advance if we will be able to add support for a given device. To do that:
- We would need to be able to predict that some developers will have the time to work on it.
- We would need to make sure that the hardware doesn't have issues preventing it from being easily supported by Replicant.

To understand better what is possible or desirable we would need to get more information on the PinePhone, for instance:
- What chip will it use for the WiFi, Bluetooth?
- What is the modem protocol?
- Is the bootloader fully free software for the A64?
In u-boot, board/sunxi/README.sunxi64 has more information about that but we also need to look into it.

And as I understand, the PinePhone is not yet released, so some things may change between the prototypes and the final device. I think it's important for the Replicant project to review the PinePhone once it's released.

The Replicant project is looking forward since quite some time to support devices with free software bootloaders, as nonfree bootloaders are a huge issue for users freedom.

As devices with free software bootloader often use kernels that are closely based on upstream Linux, adding support for any device with a kernel closely based on upstream Linux is already a very big step in that direction, and we are working on that.

Denis.

There's some Replicant devs that will receive a PinePhone from Pine64 (read that in mail list), so, my question is: PinePhone Brave Heart Edition will start selling tomorrow, there will be a Replicant Beta or Alpha version available for it?

Replicant 9 is now in development, so there will not be a Replicant 6 port for PinePhone. Because Linux and Mesa mainline status for PinePhone is quite good, I hope that it will catch up to the Exynos 4412 devices, for which Replicant 9 is being developed for, pretty soon.

Any news about Replicant on the Pinephone?

Hi....I think Replicant is android without the sans non masses and it just takes a shot at a couple of telephones, generally more seasoned equipment like a portion of the early Galaxy telephones. Also, I think/e/is a custom android rom where they attempt to supplant gmail and some other google administrations with their own.

First of all, we need LineageOS team develops a ROM for this device.
Anyway, wifi connection will not probably work...