Gareth Nelson said: > Is it theoretically possible to boot an OpenBSD kernel on an average > android device?
TLDR: this requires a lot of work and provides much less then expected in exchange. That would require a lot of drivers which we don't have. Even aftermarket Android firmware uses binary blobs from vendors for hardware support (which is actually a major roadblock for aftermarket firmware development for cheaper Android devices, like those based on Rockchip's SoCs). So in practice it is very difficult to get OpenBSD running on an Android phone, even ignoring the fact that we lack software for making phone calls, etc. Interaction between OpenBSD as user-facing OS and RTOS that manages cellular hardware would probably be the another big issue issue. Again, there's little to no documentation on topic, so OpenBSD on phone port does not look overly feasible. Lastly, running OpenBSD as user-facing OS is not particularly useful, as RTOS that runs cellular operations normally has direct write access to RAM of user-facing OS. That means that whatever firmware user installs, he is basically defendless against cellular operators and whatever bodies that can gain data from those. That also means that exploiting vulnerability in RTOS would allow an attacker direct privileged access to RAM, which effectively discards most security measures of user-facing OS. Provided that RTOS is actually in between user-facing OS and internet connection, that creates a huge attack vector which can't be dealt with by installing OpenBSD-based firmware. -- Dmitrij D. Czarkoff
