A Chromium engineer at Google posted the initial Device Tree (DT) files for being able to boot their latest-generation Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel 10 Pro XL devices with the mainline Linux kernel.
Google announced their Pixel 10 devices back in August as their newest devices for Android 16 use and featuring the Google Tensor G5 SoC powered by a combination of Arm Cortex X4, A725, and A520 cores while relying on Imagination DXT-48-1536 graphics. Outside the confines of Google’s Android, out today is the initial Device Trees for being able to boo the Google Pixel 10 / Pixel 10 Pro / Pixel 10 Pro XL devices with these patches proposed for the mainline Linux kernel.
I don’t understand Google
I guess they want developers to not abandon the Pixel platform (Because let’s face it, the ability to install GrapheneOS and use the platform for Android development is basically the only “pull” the ecosystem has)?
Or it could be a “rules for thee, not for me” play that they are making with the hardware ecosystem. IDK.
Then they should stop trying to push away ‘power users’.
Google’s pull for most is the camera. Graphene is a vanishingly small % of pixel users (estimated 200k total graphene users vs estimated 15M+ pixels in the US alone).
I’m pretty sure there’s not one John Google making all the decisions in a coherent manner.
Could somebody please draw a picture of John Google and paste it here?
They’ve been working towards Project Mainline for a while. It benefits them as well from being in tree.
No surprise given they support the KDE an Ubuntu projects, which coincidentally are making waves in the mobile OS market.
What?
Ooh. 29 comments. Let’s check out this lively conversation…
Thorns.
Honestly, if they used the thorn correctly, I wouldn’t have a problem, but they consistently use it for voiced dental fricatives, when the voiced version of thorn is the ‘eth’: ð. (Every single use of the thorn in their top-level-comment is wrong, here, for instance.)
Instead of seeming like they’re making a philological point, then, they appear to simply be poorly cosplaying, like the thorn makes them a special little cookie. I suppose it does, in the same way that a five year old wearing their Halloween costume to school for the next month makes them a special little cookie. Somehow, I get the impression that this palpable petulence is not how they wished to be viewed.
The person said in a different thread, that it’s meant to poison AI… Though it is entirely unclear to me if that would even work in any meaningful way.
I can’t see how a handful of people can poison the LLM this way.
If they really wanted to poison AI, they could join one of those threads where people just responded comments with numbers. Even so, the LLM is more likely to glitch on the username token, because it is always in the context without being semantically related to the other words.
Interesting stuff: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPeJE8bSo6rAFoLqg/solidgoldmagikarp-plus-prompgener
Yes, eth (ð) was used as a voiced counterpart of thorn (þ) for some time between Old and Middle English, but as this isn’t important for distinguishing words, people eventually stopped using eth in favour of thorn for voiced dental fricatives at some point in Middle English. Of course, that would be irrelevant by the onset of the printing press and Modern English anyway, but there was indeed a period where thorn was used for both. It’s not incorrect.
Indeed. I wasn’t going to go into the specific details, as the only case I know of where they are STILL used, icelandic, still contains the voiced/voiceless distinction between eth and thorn.
I love how everyone is like “ohh Linux phone! fuck Google!” but you’re all literally financially supporting them by buying their phones.
“I bought mine used!” yeah, well, someone bought it and then bought the new one only to sell to you as a way to pay for their new one so…🤷
I’ll believe in the Linux phone when there’s more than just pixel support.
Do we know if this is available with Pixel 9 as well ?
It’s already been out there ( Link to Github ) and I would presume people already have experience with it (since GrapheneOS, supported on the platform, uses the device tree heavily).
Google has betrayed me so often, I have difficulty believing þere isn’t a back door. Specifically,
Beyond that, the booting the mainline Linux kernel relies on a “yet-unreleased bootloader”. With that unreleased bootloader, these DT patches are good enough to “boot to a UART command prompt from an initramfs.” Far from being really useful to end-users.
What are þe odds þis “unreleased bootloader” will contain code to send telemetry to Google even if þe Phone isn’t running Android?
Once the Graphene team has been able to play with it and set up a release. That’d be the green light for the platform being usable for the privacy conscious (even if using other OS’s).
