IRC log for #neo900 on 20161102

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11:43.38BeachBuggyHi folks!
11:52.45BeachBuggyis there already any date set for the first delivery of the neo900? I'm waiting on mine ... and currently sourcing for my backup-unit the needed n900 case ..
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12:40.41jonwilI cant comment on the hardware but I can tell you the software stack isn't as far along as it could be (although exactly how usable it is right now depends on what OS/platform you intend to run on the thing)
12:42.54Wizzupjonwil: I would think the hardware is the more risky part, I guess
12:43.39jonwilin particular I can tell you that if you intend to run the N900 Maemo software stack on it, the cellular connectivity, GPS and audio are all incomplete and not usable
12:43.59jonwilwell actually the audio is incomplete and the GPS and cellular modem are non-existant
12:45.26jonwilI believe there are bits being worked on for the cellular modem and things but which platform they are in support of and what, if any, higher level software (dialer, messaging app etc etc) exists that would be able to use these bits when its finished I dont know
12:46.05Joerg-Neo900GPS is a nobrainer since maemo allows external GPS and for all that matters the GPS of Neo900 can get accessed exactly same way
12:46.22jonwilyeah GPS probably isn't a big thing
12:47.15Joerg-Neo900for cellular I suggested to use a telepathy adapter that simulates a SIP/RTP connection, or if you want it really cheap, just install asterisk
12:48.13Joerg-Neo900on the hardware side we try to kick off layout of proto_v2 right now
12:48.29jonwilWhats missing for maemo-on-N900 is the entire cellular stack
12:48.37jonwilvoice calls
12:48.40jonwilmodem management
12:48.59Joerg-Neo900not exactly correct, such stack exists, just not in maemo
12:49.13jonwilThats why I said maemo-on-N900 is missing it
12:49.16jonwilIt exists
12:49.27jonwilbut not in a form maemo-on-N900 can use at this point
12:49.40Joerg-Neo900that's why I suggested to install asterisk which has such stack, and contact to it via SIP
12:50.11Joerg-Neo900dirty clumsy but simple solution
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12:51.29jonwilThat doesn't help for all the other things that the cellular services daemon does.
12:52.00jonwilat a minimum, some sort of replacement for the gprs cellular data blobs would be necessary
12:52.23jonwilEasiest way there is probably to simply replace  libicd-network-gprs  with a new libicd plugin that talks to the Neo900 modem
12:53.35jonwilOh and would the Asterisk SIP solution work for SMS?
12:54.14jonwilI still maintain the
12:54.34Wizzupawaits hw prototypes
12:54.39bencohI wouldn't even try using asterisk for sms
12:54.47jonwilI still maintain the ultimate goal should be to replace the cellular services daemon with a daemon that exposes the same dbus interface but talks to the neo900 modem underneath
12:55.38bencohI dunno what kind of support it has now for sms (it was pretty inexistant back then) but ... I really don't see any added value
12:55.39jonwilMost of the dbus interface exposed by the daemon has been reverse engineered or would be easy to reverse engineer (certainly the bits that are most important for a functional cellular stack)
12:56.39jonwilso for SMS support, we create something that looks just like com.nokia.csd.SMS
12:57.41jonwilThe other alternative for SMS would be to create a plugin that makes SMS look to the system like an IM client
12:58.35jonwilalthough SMS and IM work so differently that I cant see it being an easy match (hence the suggestion that the easy option is to just clone the SMS interface)
13:05.30Joerg-Neo900SMS is dirt simple
13:06.09Joerg-Neo900suggests having a close look into FreeSmartphoneOrg
13:06.14Joerg-Neo900aka fso
13:06.17Joerg-Neo900~fso
13:06.17infobotsomebody said fso was the freesmartphone.org mobile devices middleware. http://www.freesmartphone.org//
13:06.30WizzupI think jonwil's point is just the maemo integration
13:06.34jonwilYes
13:06.37jonwilThe issue isn't "
13:06.44jonwilisn't "how do we get a cellular stack on the Neo900"
13:06.51Joerg-Neo900you said it
13:07.02jonwilits "how do we get a cellular stack on the Neo900 and keep the higher level parts of Maemo working"
13:07.05jonwillike the dialer
13:07.13jonwiland the messaging app
13:07.16Joerg-Neo900>>the ultimate goal should be to replace the cellular services daemon with a daemon that exposes the same dbus interface but talks to the neo900 modem underneath<<
13:07.34Joerg-Neo900--> fso, just adapt the API
13:07.40jonwiland yes that should be the goal of the maemo-on-Neo900 effort
13:08.14jonwilAnd yes FSO as a base would make sense if their upper-level-apis are close enough to what the cellular services daemon exposes to be adaptable
13:08.17jonwil:)
13:08.32Joerg-Neo900the APIs are basically all very close
13:08.52Joerg-Neo900since it's always the same functionality underneath that needs to get controlled
13:09.07Joerg-Neo900fso uses dbus exclusively
13:09.48Joerg-Neo900write a janus layer that transforms the csd lib calls to dbus
13:10.48Joerg-Neo900or in case csd already has dbus API uplink and just talks ISI/whatever downlink, replace the csd stuff completely by fso
13:11.09jonwilYeah that was my idea
13:13.41jonwilWe take FSO or whatever and change its dbus API to expose something that is `100% compatible with com.nokia.phone.SSC, com.nokia.csd.Call, com.nokia.phone.net, com.nokia.csd.SMS etc starting with those interfaces necessary for the core parts of the system (telepathy-ring, rtcom-call-ui, rtcom-messaging-ui etc)
13:13.52jonwilThat's the idea I have had all along :)
13:13.57Joerg-Neo900exactly :-)
13:14.16jonwilIt just needs someone to actually reverse engineer those bits of the dbus interface that have yet to be figured out :)
13:14.23jonwilidentify what all the numbers mean etc :)
13:14.51jonwilI went as far as I could with that myself
13:14.53Joerg-Neo900it's probably easiest to figure out by example (dbus-monitor)
13:15.02jonwilyeah :)
13:15.11jonwiland I documented whatever I could on maemo.org wiki
13:15.43Joerg-Neo900inplement fso, see what it expects, read dbus-mon log and spot the message that seems to provide the needed data
13:16.30Joerg-Neo900there night be a 10% intricate obscure messages, but 90% should be pretty obvious
13:16.48Joerg-Neo900s/night/might/
13:17.39Joerg-Neo900fso is vala but it's not _that_ bad, even I can read it ;-9
13:17.43Joerg-Neo900:-)
13:18.36Joerg-Neo900also fso supposed to have a pretty decent API documetation
13:19.28Joerg-Neo900http://www.freesmartphone.org//specs/org.freesmartphone.GSM.Call/
13:22.49jonwilmain thing that is needed for figuring out dbus interfaces from log is someone who has some knowledge of how cellular telephony works (since knowledge of how that stuff works will make it easier to spot different flags and other things in the dbus-monitor logs)
13:23.02Joerg-Neo900http://www.freesmartphone.org//specs/org.freesmartphone.GSM.SIM/  ( jonwil: for you ->>) http://www.freesmartphone.org//specs/org.freesmartphone.GSM.CB/
13:24.01Joerg-Neo900((some knowledge of how cellular telephony works)) reading the fso API docs should go a long way for that purpose
13:24.05jonwilCell Broadcast SMS wont matter to me anymore in the not-to-distant-future :)
13:24.18jonwilRight now my carrier uses CBSMS for providing cell tower IDs
13:24.26jonwilwhich is why I wrote the CBSMS thing
13:24.34jonwilbut that only comes on 2G GSM not 3G
13:24.49jonwiland my carrier is going to be shutting down 2G (to focus on 3G and 4G) soon
13:24.55Joerg-Neo900I just thought you might find this particularly informative since you know the maemo side of this segment
13:25.10Joerg-Neo900so you instantly can compare
13:26.17Joerg-Neo900you probably didn'T dive too deep into "how SMS works on network" for that
13:26.23jonwilno
13:26.33jonwilAlthough its been a while since I messed with that stuff so I would need to go back and look at it all again to remember how it worked :)
13:26.34Joerg-Neo900same for calls
13:27.13Joerg-Neo900generally the fso API is probably more sane than the maemo one
13:27.39Joerg-Neo900also note how fso is basically a holistic approach
13:28.20Joerg-Neo900I wish Nokia had adopted it from beginning, instead of impplementing own crap like MCE and whatnot
13:28.42Joerg-Neo900liblocation, well... ohmy
13:29.37jonwilI recon the Neo900 will be one of the few phones out there with no binary blobs of any kind on the main processor for the cellular radio (only the firmware in the radio module itself)
13:29.46Joerg-Neo900http://www.freesmartphone.org//specs/org.freesmartphone.GSM.SMS/
13:29.58Joerg-Neo900yes
13:30.09Joerg-Neo900maybe the only one
13:30.10jonwilMost Android phones (even those that run full open Android platforms) have a binary blob RIL
13:33.22Joerg-Neo900yep, I know
13:33.40bencohapart from the tiny few ones that run replicant with a free RIL (a few samsung phones, like galaxy2)
13:33.41Joerg-Neo900and this is what e.g. sailfishOS also uses
13:34.39Joerg-Neo900I think replicant can do both, it uses closed blob RIL happily as well as preferring FOSS RIL when feasible
13:34.52jonwilThe other thing I like about the Neo900 is that its hardware design means attacking the device via the network isn't going to work (the cellular modem has no access to the microphone, speakers, main RAM, main filesystem or anything running on the main OMAP cip.
13:35.08Joerg-Neo900yes
13:35.15Joerg-Neo900major design goal
13:36.03Joerg-Neo900even better: we have hardware that tells OMAP about any such attack going on on modem side
13:36.16jonwilIts not like all those Android devices running Qualcomm Snapdragon or Samsung Exynos where the NSA can use backdoors in the cellular firmware to turn on the microphone remotely and use the phone as a covert listening device or something.
13:36.33Joerg-Neo900definitely not
13:37.11Joerg-Neo900Qualcom (and prolly Exynos too) are basically running android as a VM in the modem frimware host
13:37.44Joerg-Neo900guess how protected the VM is against any arbitrary attacks from host
13:38.43jonwilDoes the CPU in the Neo900 have that secret separate CPU (Arm TrustZone or whatever its called)?
13:38.49jonwilI dont think the OMAP line does
13:38.54jonwilbut I could be wrong
13:39.08bencohI still don't understand why you think of this whole thing as a "vm"
13:39.30bencohand no, exynos doesn't always follow the same architecture
13:39.47bencoh(dunno about the latest chips, but ...)
13:40.52jonwilAlthough even if our chip does have Arm TrustZone or something, the way we build the hardware and software means we can totally avoid anything secret or unknown running on such hidden CPUs and we can be sure the only things with access to the main RAM and flash on the phone are things the user has control over.
13:41.06Joerg-Neo900bencoh: well, RING0 vs RING-N
13:41.33Joerg-Neo900jonwil: yes, exactly
13:42.14Joerg-Neo900I don't think the GP devices (3530, 3730) support TZ like the HS devices (3430, 3630)
13:42.52jonwilI dont think there exists a laptop made in the last decade that doesn't have some kind of hidden secret code running on it not in the control of the user.
13:43.06jonwilAnything x86 has Intel Management Engine secret bits
13:43.11jonwilor whatever AMD has
13:44.03jonwiland all the Arm laptops I know of all rock chips that aren't documented enough to be trustable (and may also have secret stuff running on TZ or whatever)
13:47.32jonwilOnly reason I haven't yet bought into a Neo900 is that I have a usable N900 and mo money to replace it :)
13:47.39jonwilOtherwise I would be all over the Neo900
13:53.28Wizzupjonwil: anything after core2duo does
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14:59.11BeachBuggythanks for the answers on the NEO900. I'm fairly confident the software side will get worked out -- gives me some more time to source propper cases for my backup-unit (the primary unit was ordered as a complete unit ... not fussing around with your productivity tool :-) )
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20:17.24jurovhttps://plasma-mobile.org/
20:17.38jurovPlasma Mobile aims to become a complete and open software system for mobile devices.
20:17.47jurovbased on Qt/KDE
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