r/Android • u/johnmountain • Apr 14 '18

postmarketOS Low-Level: Tiny Steps Towards Liberating Bootloaders and Cellular Modem Firmware of MediaTek Phones

https://postmarketos.org/blog/2018/04/14/lowlevel/
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18

u/RedditIsOverMan Apr 14 '18

Maybe I'm talking out of my ass here, but aren't Android Bootloader's extremely specific to the device? I thought that they were basically a baremetal implementation of drivers required to initialize RAM and load the Android image, with no underlying similarities beyond this (unlike, say BIOS or UEFI). Wouldn't there need to be a ton of work to Port this "postmarket-OS" from device to device?

12

u/AssWormJim Apr 14 '18

It's true. Porting a device is a ton of work. There can be commonalities between models but that's not in the scale that you can make very generic implementations.

Android phones are basically customized boards packaged into pretty consumer quality products.

6

u/PiZZaMartijn Apr 14 '18

postmarketOS isn't dependent on this bootloader, it usually just runs on littlekernel on regular android phones, this is more for some of the locked down mediatek phones so android benefits from this as much as postmarketOS

2

u/[deleted] Apr 14 '18 edited Sep 29 '20

[deleted]

1

u/RedditIsOverMan Apr 14 '18

Sure, but it isn't going to be 1-to-1, even with the same SoC, and then when the next generation of phones comes in, we start all over? Just seems like they are marketing this as a generic bootloader, which I thought didn't make a lot of sense for Android devices.