I’m reverse engineering and replacing the entire stack on Samsung A54 (Exynos 1380, Mali-G68), started with booting to a customized linux kernel (7.3) w/o Android layer at all (Wayland and WPE WebKit only), built a custom WLBT thin firmware to replace the original fat blob (using mac80211 as the foundation), figured out how to exploit USB control transfer and got ACE in the PBL, reconstructed (with byte-identical verification) their LK-based S-Boot, uH and harx, patched mesa/panfrost, optimized kernels for this device (finally got STT/TTS running on GPU faster than on CPU), figured out how to utilize NPU, built a custom toolchain for it. I’m trying to properly own this device (and giving it to Claude on the lowest possible level, but still running pKVM and getting rid of original hypervisors), it’s the goal number one at this point, no binary blobs, ability to change sw and control hw on-the-fly. Obviously with AI usage (Opus 5.5/4.8, GLM 5.3, Kimi 3.1), there’s a lot of work.

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thomasjeff1 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We need more people doing work like that.

	▲	leobuskin an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It’s a lot of compute and AI tokens (to reconstruct the original source code with byte-identical gate using the original toolchain - which you also need to found + figure out per-TU flags), at this point I truly believe we should go in SETI@HOME style for RE if we want to survive. With a proper caching and trust via verification - a lot of fat blobs can be resolved in a distributed way. If anyone interested - ping me, it’s boring to do solo. Next generation of the devices won’t be ours at all, there will be no easy hacks. Turn off automatic updated, do backups, pray for chaos.

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properbrew 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This sounds crazy fun, I'm going to dig out my beloved age old LG-V30 and give something similar a go. Good luck, I hope you post an update somewhere (maybe next months Ask HN), would love to hear how you get on.