Purism Continues To Explore i.MX6/i.MX8 For The Librem 5 Phone

[RelaxTrolls]

It'll be interesting to see how this all pans out... I definitely would be interested in running a gnu/linux stack, GNOME + Wayland on a phone, provided it was a seamless, quality experience... being able to cross compile apps and modify the sources, adding in extra stuff would be awesome (not that I can't do that with android, I can and do... but it's a hassle, in comparison and the androud repos eat up significant amounts of harddrive space).

If they succeed, maybe I'll be looking for a new phone, come their second gen phone.

[sverris]

Are there open drivers for this SoC? I.e. besides the GPU, what about the LTE modem and so on? Or it will again rely on the nasty Android blob and will need to use libhybris?

As open as possible, no Android.

[shmerl]

As open as possible, no Android.

Cool! Do you have a link to open drivers for this SoC? And it will be using Mesa for graphics, right?

[bug77]

I don't trust these people to figure out how to make a competent phone, such a waste of money for the people who donated to their crowdfund

For the money they have, they can't afford to customize much. Expect a slightly modified OEM phone and you won't be disappointed.
But it won't fail because of that, it will fail because phones are only sold because of an ecosystem, which in this case is extremely slim at best.

[DMJC]

The ecosystem is Linux, plenty of installations around. Really this is as close to a Free Software Foundation phone as we're probably going to ever get. There's a lot of people that want that.

[IreMinMon]

Are there open drivers for this SoC? I.e. besides the GPU, what about the LTE modem and so on? Or it will again rely on the nasty Android blob and will need to use libhybris?

Baseband has proprietary firmware driver, but FOSS kernel driver.

[starshipeleven]

And it will be using Mesa for graphics, right?

Highly likely. All iMX6 and iMX8 processors have some kind of Vivante GPU inside https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.MX#i.MX_6_series

And there is Etnaviv project that provides a working Mesa/kernel driver for Vivante GPUs. https://github.com/etnaviv

The real question is about the VPU (media decoding coprocessor).

[starshipeleven]

Baseband has proprietary firmware driver, but FOSS kernel driver.

And hardware switch to turn it off manually, and it is also connected over USB or something like that so it does not have DMA. (and it's a secondary chip, of course, so it has no say in the boot process)

[Flaburgan]

They should have focused to port GNU/Linux on Fairphone. That would have been amazing. You can't be perfect everywhere, so focus on something.

[shmerl]

Baseband has proprietary firmware driver, but FOSS kernel driver.

This is great, thanks! Finally a promising device in the making.