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The BQ Ubuntu Phone Will Be Stocked With Binary Blobs

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  • The BQ Ubuntu Phone Will Be Stocked With Binary Blobs

    Phoronix: The BQ Ubuntu Phone Will Be Stocked With Binary Blobs

    The BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition smartphone announced today that will begin selling next week via "flash sales" is certainly interesting from the software side with being the first official Ubuntu Phone, but from a hardware side, it's less than exciting...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    It's hard enough to introduce a new smartphone platform on the market as it is, let's not add additional complexity.

    This is why the KDE tablet failed: they were trying to do both at the same time. I applaud the effort, but I believe that it would be better to work toward that goal later, than not launching or launching an expensive or underspec'd but free phone.

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    • #3
      Originally posted by [Knuckles] View Post
      It's hard enough to introduce a new smartphone platform on the market as it is, let's not add additional complexity.

      This is why the KDE tablet failed: they were trying to do both at the same time. I applaud the effort, but I believe that it would be better to work toward that goal later, than not launching or launching an expensive or underspec'd but free phone.
      I think only a few people actually expected a device that would even make RMS happy, but Mediatek is one of the most Linux hostile companies out there.

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      • #4
        Yeah, well, wasn't one of the main points of Mir that Canonical wanted a platform that works well with closed-source drivers? With Wayland closed-source drivers were always second-rate citizens

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        • #5
          Originally posted by nanonyme View Post
          Yeah, well, wasn't one of the main points of Mir that Canonical wanted a platform that works well with closed-source drivers? With Wayland closed-source drivers were always second-rate citizens
          That is not the point of MIR. In fact, i'm not sure what that is, but MIR and Wayland have the same driver model, and once you have a driver that works with one of them it is easy to have it working on the other one too.
          The Jolla phone runs a Wayland compositor using closed drivers, just like MIR is doing.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by giucam View Post
            That is not the point of MIR. In fact, i'm not sure what that is, but MIR and Wayland have the same driver model, and once you have a driver that works with one of them it is easy to have it working on the other one too.
            The Jolla phone runs a Wayland compositor using closed drivers, just like MIR is doing.
            That is correct, they both use EGL afaik and what works on Wayland can be made to work on Mir and vice versa. As for the phone I dont know why some people are surprised that it uses binary blobs, it is a necessity at the moment if one wants the OS to use all chipset capabilities properly, there is no fully open source hardware chipset that can power phones at the moment, or at least I dont know of any such chipset, and like you said even the Jolla phone uses closed drivers. Bickering about this is creating issues where there are none, binary blobs are necessary for a fully functional phone, deal with it people, one day when there is an open source phone chipset, or properly reverse engineered free drivers for existing chipsets, we can criticize Jolla, Canonical or any other mobile Linux OS for not using it, but at the moment this is a necessity.

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            • #7
              As an owner of a Shield Tablet, the Tegra K1 would be terrible in a phone. The battery life would really suck. I love my Shield, but battery life is not that great.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by Cerberus View Post
                As for the phone I dont know why some people are surprised that it uses binary blobs,
                Thats not the surprise. The surprise is that a SoC Vendor is used that never update his blobs.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by Nille View Post
                  Thats not the surprise. The surprise is that a SoC Vendor is used that never update his blobs.
                  And like I explained in another thread that is not a problem for updates on Ubuntu Touch as it is designed differently from Android, new versions can use "old" drivers just like newer Linux distributions often use "old" drivers that just work even though they havent been updated regularly, Android requires mandatory new drivers when major revisions of Android come out, but it seems Ubuntu Touch does not require that. Proof is in the Ubuntu Touch itself, its development cycle passed through many versions, currently being based on 15.04, and I doubt MediaTek provided different drivers during that cycle, we can therefore conclude that Ubuntu Touch updates do not depend on driver updates from the chipset manufacturer.

                  If Ubuntu Touch attains any kind of success and brings more money to Canonical then we can expect them to produce their own phone, and that one should be based on more open hardware, but in the mean time they cant be picky and need to get their OS on the market any way they can, and they chose a good strategy by picking up phones with decent hardware for the price (BQ and upcoming Meizu models) and shipping with Ubuntu Touch, Jolla is doing it wrong and produced a significantly more expensive phone that isnt much better than Aquaris HD 4.5, also uses closed drivers, and is generally too expensive to be bought by enthusiasts who want to play with it. "Recycling" existing phones is much cheaper and makes them more accessible to potential buyers.

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                  • #10
                    Oh this is ridiculous, Mediatek is the worst SoC vendor and this is non-debatable. Many Android phones were stuck on Android 4.2 until very recently because of Mediatek. Their support package is a buggy mess of Android-only blobs that's never updated. Allwinner almost seems like a saint compared to Mediatek. AFAIR Google even tried to convince Mediatek to open up their stuff because of the popularity of their SoCs, but they weren't successful at all.

                    I don't get it, why do manufacturers still put up with this? Cheap chip prices aren't everything.
                    Last edited by brent; 06 February 2015, 04:03 PM.

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