this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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i tried to build a risc-v smartphone but the ox64 is a pita and i gave up, lol using an ARM core for that project now (once i get my damned shipment)
I have an orange-crab running Linux right now for an entirely auditable system up to that point and something reasonable secure but yeah I have not made the time to crank out some software/drivers for a screen, keyboard, and Internet.
I have a clockworkpi uConsole with the R-01 RiscV board and a cellular modem that works great but again we're back to square 1 since I couldn't find much auditing done on the chip and I have not personally opened up any of mine. Although if my memory serves me right the sister core (XuanTie C910) had some holes in it so I guess it's good someone looked at part of the family at least and published it. Also if I'm not mistaken the modem has an Arm in it running who knows what too like any other modem. The only auditable modem firmware I know of is the one for the pinephones.
Within the rabbit hole, I think I'd trust anything between:
Idk what the upper limit is though I'd like to know.
fellow u-console owner! i have the a-06. the modem is shite, in my experience. i can't say for sure but i'd guess it's arm. the pinephone (pro) uses the eg25-g (as i discuss in the article), which runs an android bootloader, older linux kernel, and generic gnu(?) userland. the bootloader, kernel, and userland are all FOSS (well, they can be flashed to be, anyway). the ADSP (the code that directly interfaces with the radios) is proprietary, for practical and regulatory reasons. this doesn't really effect my threat model, as i assume that anything a sophisticated attacker could glean from an ADSP backdoor they could much more easily glean through the radio traffic itself. the TZ (arm trustzone) firmware is also proprietary, for technical reasons. iirc it's signed by ARM, but this is just off the top of my head, so don't quote me! or do, i'm not your dad...