It has been about 6 months since we last released a batch of images. A few things of interest were completed in the meantime, so we are rolling out new images today.
This release doesn’t bring support for any new device: instead, it mostly contains stability fixes for the devices we already support. The most considerable change in this release is the inclusion of the Samsung-RIL rewrite, that was developed this summer. Samsung-RIL is the component in charge of dealing with the modem, the hardware chip that communicates with the mobile telephony network. The code that was used since then didn’t have a good structure and didn’t meet the code quality standards required to call it stable or reliable. The rewrite should be more robust and fail-proof: it has been tested daily on a couple of devices for the past few months, with no major incident to report. The Samsung-RIL rewrite has about as many features supported as the previous version, with the exception of a few ones that were broken anyway (mainly, USSD and STK).
The new code establishes a sane basis for external contributions, so everyone is welcome to dig in and add support for what’s missing.
Another big achievement in that release is the inclusion of about a dozen security fixes, covering issues such as Shellshock, Master key, Fake ID and much more, thanks to reports by community members.
As usual, you can checkout the complete changelog, download the images from the ReplicantImages page and find installation instructions as well as build guides on the Replicant wiki.
Even though this release doesn’t introduce support for any new device, I have been at work regarding devices that make the best candidates for freedom and privacy/security. As mentioned in an earlier post, we are going to focus the development effort on a few devices that allow running free bootloaders and are either likely to have good modem isolation or don’t have a modem at all.
Recently, I have been working on adding Replicant support for Sunxi devices. There is a lot of work to do in that area and while nothing was released yet, it looks promising. I also spent a considerable amount of time working on the LG Optimus Black (P970)’s bootloader. I will be posting a series of articles about what an incredible journey it has been so far on my personal blog over the next few days. Eventually, the device will be properly documented in our wiki and as soon as U-Boot reaches feature completeness, it will be time to start porting Replicant to the device!
December 20th update: The full series of articles about freeing the LG Optimus Black (P970) is now available: