[LEDE-DEV] Open and secure firmware for Quectel 4G modems [Was: Re: Quectel EC20 QMI autoconnect issues [Was: Re: [LEDE-DEV, 3/3, v3] uqmi: Prevent 'POLICY MISMATCH' error.]]

[Petr Štetiar]

Bjørn Mork <bjorn at mork.no> [2017-01-08 23:10:20]:

> The output above comes from the Sierra Wireless EM7455 originally delivered
> as part of my Lenovo X1 Carbon, running bog standard firmare.

Oops. How did you get into the shell of your modem? Is it a root shell also?

Seems like some serial line filtering might be needed in the kernel, to limit
access to such backdoor commands like 'AT+QLINUXCMD' only to certain users :-)

It's like a bad dream, really.

> Trying not to kill the optimism here, but...  But this is a project with
> about the same complexity as replacing Android on a phone.

It's not that complex, it's missing the UI part, WiFi, BLE etc. :-) But I
understand the complexity, that's why I'm trying to bring some attention into
this project, probably help little bit also.

> And IMHO it's rather pointless unless you do something about the "baseband"
> image.

It's not pointless for me. We do the same with our routers, even if we still
can't control the WiFi binary blob firmwares in majority of them. I would be
happy if I could build custom firmware image for my modem using LEDE. Why not
use the modem as the only CPU in the system? Quectel modems have quite a long
EOL, making it quite viable target.

> Which is probably not feasible due to the complete lack of any source
> code or documentation from Qualcomm.

Yep, time will show :-)

-- ynezz