I wouldn't be surprised if Xiaomi intend to use this for their laptops with Windows 11 once the software ecosystem matures. Which both ARM and Qualcomm are working on. But I still believe in terms of PC usage it is all going to be Nvidia.
They do allow to unlock their bootloaders, which is rather rare, which in turn allows to run Linux. Seeing as Chins just migrates their entire administration to Linux, it's not far fetched to assume they'll support Linux on their laptops very soon.
Kafka himself would be proud if their unlocking process[0], but technically sure, they allow it
> Press "Apply for unlocking" at exactly 12:00 AM GMT+8 (pressing it too late will cause the "application quota limit reached" error. Use this website to check the time)
"Account Error" might show up. If that happens, retry after 10 days
I think that Samsung sells rooted devices to companies or organizations engaged in their partner program. There’s at least one company using those commercially in Europe to offer a modified device. I wonder if there is a gray market for Chinese boot loader unlocked devices, or if that’s dealt with on a service per device transaction level with some cellphone shop. If you can buy a device from Samsung with an unlocked boot loader and customized security updates in a sort-of private contract, where they acquire them with who knows what arrangement today that started with their partner program, it seems like a price issue more than a practical issue or policy limitation. I see the software for unlocking devices frequently but I suspect it is a short lived game for those people, either using factory provisioning while they have access to the software or otherwise monetizing the effort to offer these tools and services. Probably malware, definitely device info collection, but it just ends up at the same conclusion. if there is friction, why? Is Goog adversarial to developer devices now? Athe devices without friction in some other way made compliant or unsuitable for general use? Is unlocking the boot loader so much a risk to the firmware delivery and control scheme for the baseband propriety stuff and chipsets or is it just that it’s vertically integrated in western markets through device financing by telecoms? — I do mean to seriously ask what is their holdup. They can’t afford to develop the software and hardware simultaneous tracked and offer that product if it leaves the control of their promised end user as a client?
I'm not experience here, but are there any obstacle to move from "unlocking bootloader" to "running full blow linux on phone" ? I imagine it can't be that simple(mostly driver issue).
Lots of obstacles. The biggest obstacle is having access to the kernel sources. Even if you've got access to the kernel source, driver blobs are a big issue, because if you move to a newer kernel the old drivers may not work.
Take a look at the PostmarketOS Device Wiki[1], you'll see that even phones released 10+ years ago (like Xiaomi Redmi 4) still do not have 100% functionality.
In saying that, in this era of LLMs and reverse-engineering, it may not be long before some of these blockers are reverse-engineered and we might end up with a fully functional Linux distro on older phones like this.
i'm not kernel dev, but i've heard the folk at kernel always try to maintain a stable API so as not to break backward compatible, is this the case here ?
No, that stability is only promised for userland apps, not kernel-level stuff like drivers. In fact, there is no stable API/ABI for device drivers.
Now this mostly isn't a big issue on the desktop/x86 world, because most drivers are open source, except for some exceptions like certain Broadcom drivers and old nVidia drivers. nVidia used to be a massive headache to deal with because the driver would frequently break with kernel updates, but thankfully that's mostly a thing of the past after they released an open driver, relegating most of the proprietary code to their GSP firmware.
Also, PCs and the x86 platform in general are much more open and hacker-friendly, making it relatively easier to reverse-engineer drivers, so as a result we also have a good chunk of drivers maintained by the community.
So the lack of ABI/API stability isn't a big issue generally in the desktop space.
Now in the embedded/ARM space however, things are very different. Unfortunately due to the precedence set by Google, Apple and earlier mobile vendors, chipset vendors generally don't release their sources; even their architecture documentation is closely guarded and hard to obtain, never mind the sources. And the chipset themselves (like the camera/ISP) are tiny black boxes and hard to debug and reverse engineer. So unless this situation changes (ie, official Linux support from the manufacturers themselves), a simple unlocked bootloader means nothing.
This basically answers my question about dark weather in the future for all of this. If Google is standing on an issue of trusting their clients to be in the right bucket of profitable customer to get through agreements and NDAs on what they’re proving unless you’re a multi national juicy enterprise target they’re really not the people I want to deal with. I don’t know what kind of deal Google has but I suspect they finance a substantial amount of “evolutions” for their purposes through the blob device vendors.
