Few comments after reading Wiki

Werner Almesberger werner at openmoko.org
Wed May 16 18:04:22 CEST 2007


Ian Stirling wrote:
> Why should a phone be better in this respect than a PC?

Well, on the PC, you don't change the BIOS very often, if ever.
Furthermore, the BIOS is in storage that your system doesn't
usually access either.

On the Neo, your "BIOS" is the boot loader, so every time you
upgrade the boot loader, you get a chance to brick your system.
Furthermore, basically all non-removable storage is just one
single Flash area, so the driver writing your data files is just
a few bits away from bricking the device.

There are some protections, but software is very limited in what
it can do. Also, neither the MCU nor the Flash memory have any
complementary protection mechanisms. (In the next device, also
the MCU will have some reasonably good protection against the
most common forms of accidental overwriting.)

And no, I don't think we want to get into DRM ;-)

- Werner

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 / Werner Almesberger, Buenos Aires, Argentina     werner at almesberger.net /
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