Photographs of disassembly and PCB of a e-ten glofiish X800

Heh. You could say I'm now among other things a professional hardware reverse engineer. This mostly started as a kid, where I always had to take everything apart. In more recent years, I've mostly been doing hardware reverse engineering as part of the gpl-violations.org effort, or projects like openezx.org.

Now, I've actually been asked by a company to buy a device on their expense to disassemble and photograph it, to find out about the components it uses, etc. And no, before you start to wonder, I don't work for Openmoko anymore. So they are not that company ;)

The device in question is the E-TEN glofiish X800, a full-vga 3.5G Windows Mobile PDA-Phone with AGPS, Wifi and bluetooth. You can find the pictures of the disassembly process and PCB photographs here.

As you can see, the device employs the following major components / chipsets:

• Samsung S3C2442B SoC with integrated SDRAM and NAND (same like Openmoko GTA02)
• CSR4 based Bluetooth (same like Openmoko and many other devices)
• microSD slot, must be connected to S3C2442 SD/MMC controller
• WiFi Module using a Marvell 8686 chipset (you actually can't see that, I had to peel open the shielding of the module and the angle didn't allow any good photographs)
• TD028TTEC1 LCD module, exactly the same as the OpenMoko GTA01/GTA02
• AKM 4641 audio codec, reportedly used in HP iPAQ and HTC Universal
• Two cameras of unknown type, must be using the S3C2442 camera interface
• Ericsson based quad-band GSM and tri-band 3.5G chipset centered around the DB3150, which is used in many Sony-Ericcson 3G/3.5G phones. Sony-Ericsson has excellent public documentation on their AT-commandset for their phones. Since they are likely to use the same firmware base, the AT commandset should thus be known.
• A Xilinx CPLD

So now what does all this mean? Setting aside the CPLD and the unknown camera modules, this device (and its keyboard-enabled brother the M800) should be a very attractive target for porting Linux to it. Known SoC, wifi with driver already in mainline, GSM/3.5G modem with documented AT commands, etc.

Big question is the power management. It looks like they're using a lot of discrete regulators rather than an integrated PMU. Also, the CPLD is likely to cause a lot of trouble since neither the external connection nor the internal logic is known...

VIA releases open source Xorg driver

VIA has just released a open source Xorg driver for their integrated graphics chips on their linux.via.com.tw portal. Here's the actual download link for the source code tarball.

I am very happy to see this! It's one more step that VIA has been working on to improve and show their support for Free Software and Linux.

Please notice that this driver (as opposed to VIA's proprietary binary-only Xorg driver) has no support for 3D, hardware video codec or TV encoder support. Nevertheless, it is a big step ahead.

Of course everyone involved understands that this simple "code drop" is not enough and that it is just the first step for actual 'Free Software integration'. There is a lot to be done to harmonize the current FOSS driver landscape for VIA's graphics products, from the old via driver in the Xorg git tree, over the unichrome and openchrome and now this new driver. Stay tuned!

Back to Taipei: More work with VIA.

I've just arrived in Taipei two days ago. I'm looking forward to an exciting four weeks of close work with VIA, talking with various different groups in management as well as actual software engineers.

I can only repeat my earlier statements: It still feels great to be able to play such a substantial role in improving the Free Software interaction of a large chip maker and key player in the PC industry.

Of course being in Taipei also enables me to meet again with former colleagues at OpenMoko. I just returned from a very nice dinner conversation with jserv.

gpl-violations.org report in Financial Times Deutschland

The German business newspaper Financial Times Deutschland has published an article about my GPL enforcement work. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first such article in a general newspaper. All previous coverage was in publications or magazines tailored to the IT industry.

However, the content is of very low quality, and the actual facts are wrong in a number of cases. First of all, why go to a personal level and describe myself as having a 'Harry Potter hairstyle', and then calling me "a mixture between bill gates and a heavy-metal fan". I hereby deny any similarity with Bill Gates. I had my hair style like this even in the nineties (before growing it long around 1997-2000 and then cutting it again in 2001). And I listen to a lot of weird music, though heavy metal is generally not on my playlist. Anyway, what is the point of all of that? How does this help people to evaluate the risk of GPL violations?

Further down, the article has claims like "the driver software of the router also contained some lines of code that were originally written by Welte". First of all, it is the firmware, not the driver. Secondly, it is more than a couple of lines (since a couple of lines would probably not constitute a copyrightable work).

The article also explicitly states that I am not fighting for money, but "out of principle". Despite that, it also claims "The first couple of companies are shivering expecting the destruction of their book value". That's illogical.

Furthermore, there are claims that I have focused on companies that only used small amount of open source. To the contrary: The majority of the products that I've enforced so far contain 75% or more open source software. Only small portions were added by the respective vendors.

To the contrary, there was a recent article in the Berliner Morgenpost paper one of the CCC Leaders which was really well-researched and of high quality. Even that one gets some minor facts wrong, but still portrays a realistic picture.

1654 THE CAVE

Today I found out about this years schedule for 1654 THE CAVE.
Today it will happen.
And I'm even going to be in the right part of Germany.

The best coincidence of this year.

Small update on my VIA related work

I know there are many curious readers about what is happening at VIA with regard to Free Software. There are many things that I cannot talk about, but I can still state how excited I am by my new role, and how many (some big, some mall) steps I have managed to make during the short time that I'm working with VIA now.

The last week was mainly talking to various FOSS developers that have written or are maintaining existing Linux drivers for VIA hardware, like Ethernet, I2C, SATA/RAID, AGP, DRM/DRI and others. I have been able to provide hardware reference manuals that some of them have been trying to get their hands on for a long time (even willing to sing and NDA). VIA has also starting to offer reference hardware to selected Linux developers.

I'll be back to Taipei in roughly three weeks (August 21st) and am looking forward to the many interactions with Product Managers and Developers. Meanwhile, I'll continue to have conf calls at weird times and sending tons of emails back and forth, trying to establish the right contacts, getting the right people to talk to each other, etc.

So far I have resisted the temptation to touch a lot of the code. But I think I will not be able to resist very long ;) Right now I just don't want to step onto anyones toes (and/or duplicate work), no matter whether in the community or inside VIA.