this passage hit android right in the face for me. hopefully we can get rid of it now in less than 30yrs...
"
In the 1980s the functionality of a microcomputer was determined at least as much by its firmware in ROM as by its hardware. The Apple MacIntosh might have had a similar hardware architecture to the Atari ST, but each had its own different operating system in ROM.
Of course there were those brave people who would replace the ROM chips inside their computers by ROMs they had programmed themselves, so they could regain complete control over their machines, which was lost when the front panel had disappeared. Coreboot is just such an endeavor.
"
it's nice that everyone can compile an android rom, but with closed drivers and proprietary boot managers we are in that precarious state...
The situation is particularly bad for ARM SoCs since the majority of them are notoriously proprietary - at least with an x86/PC backwards compatibility means a lot has stayed the same even though there have been many differences, and that gives a basic point to start exploring and reverse-engineering (basically you can assume the BIOS is at the top of the address space and the first instruction after reset is at FFFF:FFF0), but with ARM about the only thing that stays the same is the CPU core; the boot sequence, where the peripherals are (and what exactly is available), etc. are all vastly different between makes and models. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it'll need a lot more effort if you don't have the official documentation.
" In the 1980s the functionality of a microcomputer was determined at least as much by its firmware in ROM as by its hardware. The Apple MacIntosh might have had a similar hardware architecture to the Atari ST, but each had its own different operating system in ROM.
Of course there were those brave people who would replace the ROM chips inside their computers by ROMs they had programmed themselves, so they could regain complete control over their machines, which was lost when the front panel had disappeared. Coreboot is just such an endeavor. "
it's nice that everyone can compile an android rom, but with closed drivers and proprietary boot managers we are in that precarious state...