Dumb question — can LLM be used to reverse-engineer firmware blobs or binary only drivers for Linux, to create open-source drivers, for example, for unsupported smartphones?
Dumb question — can LLM be used to reverse-engineer firmware blobs or binary only drivers for Linux, to create open-source drivers, for example, for unsupported smartphones?
That is already happening for old games, and while they usually run on simpler CPUs than modern ones, I don't see why this couldn't be possible for binary Linux drivers.
The toolchain would also be easier to match, unless they were using some proprietary compiler you can't get your hands on.
Just lookup how they match the toolchain, and find an agent harness to do decompilation.
I wonder if doing this kind of stuff with more recent software will cause more legal problems though. I am not really sure of the legal status of the resulting code.
Most likely, this (reverse engineering) is one of the numerous things these LLM companies target. You can also assume all of the internet has been slurped up in to any frontier model. That doesn't mean what you want will be a one shot prompt though...
As I'm working in this area, I can say that the biggest problem isn't binary only drivers but spotty mainline support of core features (provided that we're talking about Android phones, not iPhones or old Windows mobile stuff)
From where you're standing, what does the path to improving mainline support of core features look like? Aside from sheer volume of work are there other major challenges or opportunities? In the past I've hacked around adding stuff to Armbian kernels, but navigating a path to mainline seemed like a whole other job.
It really depends of your device but some SOC have very poor mainline support and are essentially living in a forked repo with nothing sent to lkml, others have partial support in mainline but with some of the core features being broken.
Drivers can also be partially implemented / buggy depending on the device. (And I'm not talking about closed source stuff, even things like usb or touch screen drivers).
I would say that the major blocker is that nobody really cares about these devices and the task itself to mainline them is gigantic.
Most SOC have 3 or maybe 4 contributors maximum and the phonedev kernel mailing list gets a new patch only every 2 days. The whole phone mainlining community is probably less than 60 people.