com.google.fastboot

[Halfgreek]

I am a newby to Linux and have the Pinephone and Pinephone Pro.  I have installed PMos on the PP and Mobian on the PPP.  I have to admit that switching to different OSs is lots of fun.  I have a lot of issues trying to make one of them my daily driver device. (Beyond sick of Google and Apple among many other big tech life drainers)  I am just wondering why a Linux open source device has to have a Google protocol in the firmware of the modem in both phones. (com.google.fastboot) Is it communicating to Google in any way? If so, then this defeats the purpose of what I am personally trying to accomplish and not sure how to proceed from here.  Like I said, I am new to Linux and need some guidance if you would be so kind.

Thank you in advance.

[Kevin Kofler]

Well, the modem is something like a headless Android phone. At least, it uses the Android bootloader (Fastboot) and an Android-like downstream kernel. But it does not run the Android userspace, so it should be free of Google services and the like. There is the unofficial firmware from Biktorgj which has fewer proprietary components, so you can know better what it does. But it does not replace the Fastboot bootloader, the Trustzone kernel nor the DSP firmware, only the main OS running on the modem's ARM CPU, and the kernel it ships is based on Quectel's downstream kernel sources (based on the ancient Linux 3.18.140 whose upstream support on kernel.org ended in 2019).

[zetabeta]

in pinephone reg and pro, there is eg25g modem chip. which is like small computer. basically computer within computer. eg25g chip uses fastboot. so eg25g uses some aosp software projects, these projects do not communicate using internet and are open source.

everything what google does, is not closed. google still has some open source projects, like aosp. many of them do not do anything with internet, only locally. (aosp development is controlled by google, and i think google will partially close aosp in the future though).

eg25g is quectel's chip with quectel's code. quectel uses adb and fastboot for some issues like updating.

if i know correctly, even pinephone linux based operating systems uses some google's code. such code is open source and depending on a case is part of aosp.

see following, is you plan to use stock firmware, i recommend 30.007 version and following modifications for both stock and sdk. so i have some differences with biktorg's view.
https://github.com/Biktorgj/quectel_eg25_recovery
https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pine...ETTINGS.md

[Halfgreek]

Thank you very much for the very detail explanations.  I knew I came to the right community. That makes me feel so much better and now I have other options to dive a little deeper on the firmware.