Re: HTC TyTN || (P4550) violates GPL?? Or maybe Qualcomm itself with MSM7200???

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Hi, this is Harald from gpl-violations.org. Given my involvement with projects like OpenEZX and OpenMoko, I was obviosuly very interested in investigating this issue.

CIJOML wrote:
Hi there,

it looks like there is running linux somewhere inside in the radio part of the firmware...

http://forum.xda-developers.com/archive/index.php/t-326419.html

$ strings kaiser_radio_0x301.nb |grep -i linux
 M6500C L4/Linux
 L4 Linux
NICTNICTA::Pistachio - built on Jan 23 2007 18:10:22 by dpandian@l4linux15 using gcc version 3.4.1
 start_linux_cmd
 vmlinux != NULL
 vmlinux
 vmlinux igms_name=ramdisk root=/dev/igms0
 start_linux

Can anybody else confirm this and contact those companies for source codes?

I have confirmed that the abovementioned strings are present in the radio firmware of the device.

However, after a detailed analysis (spent the better part of yesterday looking at the various L4 sources and the firmware binary) it seems evident that the strings are part of the linux loader, i.e. the part of L4 that can execute a specially-modified linux kernel (called wombat).

The lua startup script of the radio firmware does not execute the start_linux function but rather only the start_server function to start a number of proprietary servers on top of the microkernel.

So at least up to this level of analysis, I cannot find any reason to believe there is Linux in the radio firmware. However, this obviously is also no hard proof.

If anyone still has reason to believe Linux is used in the radio firmware of the Qualcomm MSM7200 chipset, please let me know. I'm happy to investigate in case new evidence comes up.

As a side note, it would be the most stupid thing to do for a GSM chipset vendor. In all existing smartphone chipsets you have two CPU cores (an ARM9 for baseband and ARM11 for the UI/apps in the MSM7200) to avoid any licensing and regulatory issues arising from running the GSM stack in the more-or-less open OS on the application side (Windows Mobile, Linux, ...)

Cheers,

- Harald Welte <[email protected]>                   http://gnumonks.org/
============================================================================
We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds. -- Linus

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