• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • From my small experience with Qualcomm in the past, I’m not too hopeful. In a company I used to work for, we wanted to use one of their SoC with Linux, which they claimed they supported. It was many years ago. But was full of closed binary blobs which even when signing NDAs, we couldn’t get the source for. We’re talking user-space drivers, sensors offloaded to a separate core with closed source firmware etc. It’s Linux, but it’s not Linux in spirit, it feels so closed and proprietary and secretive. They’re coming from Android, which google architecturally enabled vendors to close their drivers by utilizing HAL. It’s the single most significant blow to Linux by any corporation so far. It enabled thousands of vendors to close their shitty driver in user-space and not maintain it for newer kernels (kernel driver is just an IO proxy for user-space drivers). I get that without it, there wouldn’t be Android phones we have today, but I expected them to slowly open up. 10+ years later, almost nothing changed, in fact - things seem worse to me.








  • One of the bigger reasons is ZigBee is capable of mesh network forming, which is useful if you want more devices to be smart. It’s also low power. And the devices are in their private network isolated from the internet, which is also a desirable quality. In summary, ZigBee is built for smart devices, whereas wifi not so much.