alt Hacker NewsI’m reverse engineering and replacing the entire stack on Samsung A54 (Exynos 1380, Mali-G68), started with booting to a customized linux kernel (7.3) w/o Android layer at all (Wayland and WPE WebKit only), built a custom WLBT thin firmware to replace the original fat blob (using mac80211 as the foundation), figured out how to exploit USB control transfer and got ACE in the PBL, reconstructed (with byte-identical verification) their LK-based S-Boot, uH and harx, patched mesa/panfrost, optimized kernels for this device (finally got STT/TTS running on GPU faster than on CPU), figured out how to utilize NPU, built a custom toolchain for it. I’m trying to properly own this device (and giving it to Claude on the lowest possible level, but still running pKVM and getting rid of original hypervisors), it’s the goal number one at this point, no binary blobs, ability to change sw and control hw on-the-fly. Obviously with AI usage (Opus 5.5/4.8, GLM 5.3, Kimi 3.1), there’s a lot of work.
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Would you be sharing the NPU learning? Was shocked when I learned you could only use it through some official SDK from Samsung
i’m interested in your pipeline for reverse engineering, how are you dealing with anthropic blocking this kind of tasks on clause code? are you delegating everything to chinese models?
This sounds crazy fun, I'm going to dig out my beloved age old LG-V30 and give something similar a go. Good luck, I hope you post an update somewhere (maybe next months Ask HN), would love to hear how you get on.
I'm working on something similar for an Alder Lake motherboard to try to get coreboot ported. Right now I'm working through decompiling and documenting CSME 16 and it's a slog with guard rails limiting me to Opus 4.8. Have you had better luck getting GLM and Kimi to do the firmware reverse engineering?