Motorola (and other Android-product manufacturers), like Apple, are confining developers to building installable applications. That's perfectly reasonable for a consumer device. Most Android devices are more open to installing apps than Apple's mobile devices, though some carriers have continued their walled-garden model even on Android.What Lori said was that if you want to do firmware/OS development, you should buy a phone that is designed and marketed for that purpose.Motorola has been pretty upfront about this since the beginning of its Linux involvement. In fact, Motorola has gone to significant lengths to protect the operating software (and, sometimes, hardware) in almost all of its devices, for decades.Linus, and at least some other core Linux developers, have expressed their comfort with this model - using Linux inside a device does not require the operating software be replaceable. Other open-source developers are not willing to allow this sort of use; hence the GPLv3 anti-Tivoization restrictions.[Disclaimer - I used to work at Motorola on Linux-phone development and occasionally had to represent this policy to open-source audiences. It's not the way I would do things myself, but there are reasonable arguments for it.] Kuhn: At Least Motorola Admits It Posted Jul 16, 2010 14:32 UTC (Fri) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
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"In reference specifically to eFuse, the technology is not loaded with the purpose of preventing a consumer device from functioning, but rather ensuring for the user that the device only runs on updated and tested versions of software. If a device attempts to boot with unapproved software, it will go into recovery mode, and can re-boot once approved software is re-installed."*what* it does precisely is rather undefined. That it modifies the silicon, however, is uncontested:"pecifically, the culprit is said to be a technology known as eFuse -- developed by IBM several years ago -- which allows circuits to be physically altered at the silicon level on demand." "The primary application of this technology is to provide in-chip performance tuning. If certain sub-systems fail, or are taking too long to respond, or are consuming too much power, the chip can instantly change its behavior by 'blowing' an eFUSE."So perhaps it's not permanent, although the linked article on antifuses indicates that they are.Conclusion seems to be that more data is needed. :) Kuhn: At Least Motorola Admits It Posted Jul 18, 2010 21:37 UTC (Sun) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]
ah, cool. I just toured down there with a group of student from ou/uark a couple of weeks ago (we saw the fab in dmos 6, I think it was)."From what I remember in our other devices, we don't let our customers program e-fuses."That's at odds from the report, which says that the bootloader tells the efuse to blow. (follow slashdot->mobilecrunch->mydroidworld forum posting by "ps3droid").However, the original post that kicked this whole thing off was"So this post is a mix of hard information and a bit of conjecture on my part (guesses)."How much is of each is unstated. and I've no idea who this person is or how he/she got his/her information. So the trail grows cold here.*shrug* The ultimate source of the *fuse* bit is rather misty, so I think I'll have to give mot the credit of the doubt (although I'd give pause before handing over hundreds of my own hard-earned dollars)."it matches up nicely with Motorola's statement that you can re-flash an authorized image to restore the device's original functionality."Well actually the quote is that"If a device attempts to boot with unapproved software, it will go into recovery mode, and can re-boot once approved software is re-installed."It doesn't say that the end-user can do the re-install and recovery, only that it will reboot once approve software has been re-installed. Is the efuse one-way, or can it be reset?"Take off the tin-foil hat and apply Occam's Razor.""tin-foil hat" tends to be used deprecatingly, and I tend to bristle when people accuse me of wearing a tinfoil hat. Perhaps you didn't mean to be insulting; I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Regardless, hard experience (e.g. I'm a ps3 owner who bought the ps3 more for the linux than for the games; sadly it's now gotta be 100% linux) has taught me to be very, very, very cautious when I regard what large businesses (and other entities in general, although the power disparity in a relationship with a large megacorp as an end-user is so absurdly large that we mice have to beware of the elephant's feet!) say, and look at the *letter* of what they say, not the spirit.However, permanent, temporary, carrier-serviceable, or other, the core point that Kuhn makes is clear; Mot doesn't seem to appreciate end-user freedom. and I'm rather fond of maintaining my freedoms. Kuhn: At Least Motorola Admits It Posted Jul 19, 2010 3:28 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]
There seems to be a lot of wild speculation about that assumes the worst possible motives on the part of Motorola, and what I was saying is that you don't need wild conspiracy theories about Mot bricking phones on purpose to explain this. Refusing to load unsigned code until a service center reinstalls it isn't nearly so malevolent as irreversibly destroying the phone. The former may require a trip to the service center, and the latter requires you to buy a new phone.
Right, but the problem is that we have only conjecture about what parts are true, which parts are false/wrong, and what parts are conjecture. :)"E-fuses are used more like jumpers of yore (only shrunk to be on the die) than like the ones in your fusebox in the garage. We architect our software and arrange our manufacturing flows accordingly. (Beyond that level of description, I'm not sure where I cross into proprietary information, so I'll stop there.)"No worries; I respect that (I used to work at a large hard drive manufacturer for two summers). It sounds a lot like this is a plausible scenario."The fact that the device is recoverable by a reflash implies that nothing truly permanent has happened to the device."Well, no. Strictly speaking, Mot says"If a device attempts to boot with unapproved software, it will go into recovery mode, and can re-boot once approved software is re-installed."How the re-installation can occur is completely unspecified. It could conceivably be that the OP was correct that the software can fuse a selected part in order to require you to go back to the shop and get a new chip, or get a second fuse blown for you (perhaps something like DVD drives do where you get five free reflashes at the store and then it's clear you're a baddie and you have to buy a new phone (or even just a new chip)) It's hardware/software; the primary constraints are laws, consumer (or customer, if they're like me and know and use the distinction) reaction and how much we can pack into a chip before it's too big/consumes too much power. Hooray for digital progress!"This mode should be the same mode the phone goes to if a legitimate update fails, say, due to a power glitch during the update." It *could* be the same, but we have only supposition."That's got nothing to do with the e-fuse question at hand, though. It just determines how you restore the phone once it's been flashed with unauthorized code."They might be unrelated. They might not be unrelated. We have no [b]data[/b], we have only supposition (and layer upon layer of it). There are definitely scenarios that could involve the fuse, even if the supposition that the fuse is permanently blown is true."Refusing to load unsigned code until a service center reinstalls it isn't nearly so malevolent as irreversibly destroying the phone."Malevolence is motivation and rather tangential to the questions at hand. Rather, the question is what the [i]problems[/i] to us would be. and how problematic having a phone be a brick until you get it to a service center depends on a lot of things, and notably how far and inconvenient it is to get to the service center. :)To summarize, my current position is that we need a lot more data before we can draw reliable conclusions about anything in this situation. Hopefully mot will be forthcoming with it. I'm very very glad you brought more data to the table. Despite not necessarily being directly transferable to the mot scenario, they're at least indicative about the state of current technology."I told them I didn't want to have to root my phone to be able to use it in the way that I want."I'll drink to that! (Is incidentally why I don't have an iphone; my mac fanatic friends/colleagues said, well just root it to get an xterm and ssh.. riiiiight. "Jailbreaking" is rather a poor metaphor; rather, it should be something like hostage-freeing perhaps, or something involving a raid on a property theft ring and getting your TV back. :) Kuhn: At Least Motorola Admits It Posted Jul 19, 2010 9:33 UTC (Mon) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]
"Newer versions of a [shared] library might use all new symbol versions, which would be unresolved in an older library version."Uh, what? If a Windows developer has a more recent version of a 3rd party DLL than a tester, and the developer's version has functions which he uses which are not present in the testers older version, is the author seriously suggesting that Windows is capable of magic that inserts the missing symbols into the testers 3rd party DLL? Utter crap."Some distributions may not have all the libraries installed that you need. [...] game libraries like SDL, Ogg/Vorbis, and OpenAL may not be [available]"Name 1 distribution that is not incredibly niche (say, must be in top 50 at distrowatch), and is meant to be general purpose (so, no specifically "minimal" or "rescue" distros), which does not provide any of the above libraries. If no such distro exists, I call FUD."if you link your executable against the OpenAL library, you may discover that the OpenAL library requires other libraries like ALSA, arts or esd"And distros specify these things call "dependencies" so that if the tester installs OpenAL, all the libraries OpenAL requires are also installed automatically."Different distributions may build libraries differently."OK. This one has the potential to cause problems, e.g. if you use OpenSSL's implementation of MD4, but a distro has not built MD4 support in its version of OpenSSL because it's so old and broken. I'm not sure it's particularly likely though. Most distros ship libraries as complete as possible to prevent this kind of problem - after all, every single one of the apps they provide that depend on that library have to work with the version they ship. So I'm sceptical as to how likely this is to happen in real life. Kuhn: At Least Motorola Admits It Posted Jul 16, 2010 16:52 UTC (Fri) by RCL (guest, #63264) [Link] 2ff7e9595c