Security quotes of the week

Posted Aug 13, 2015 12:34 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Security quotes of the week by Wol
Parent article: Security quotes of the week

> Part of the trouble is that most Android phones (all?) are arm-based. And the arm driver tree needs a massive cleanup.

No, it's not that the "arm driver tree needs a massive cleanup" -- it's that the *manufacturers* of the handsets, platforms, and SoCs need to (first) actually release source code and (ideally) put forth the effort necessary to get that code into the mainline kernel. Only then can the mainline kernel be expected to support things sanely.

Security quotes of the week

Posted Aug 13, 2015 22:52 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

As I understand it, even the drivers in the mainline kernel suffer from this mess :-(

Too many companies HAVE released their drivers as open source, by tossing them over the wall. And they are heavily garbled versions of other drivers, which are garbled versions of yet other drivers, and it's turtles all the way down ...

I gather a lot of work has been put in to cleaning this mess up, but I got the impression it's not complete.

And that's why DeviceTree is necessary - unlike on x86 where MS pretty much forced standardisation, on arm there is no way to probe and identify hardware because it's far too easy for a probe for device A to crash device B - not a good idea. Once DeviceTree is in place, I think you will just have to give your linux kernel the tree, and it will know what hardware is where in the memory map, which will make driver management much easier.

Cheers,
Wol