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Community Council | Posts: 4,920 | Thanked: 12,867 times | Joined on May 2012 @ Southerrn Finland
#1799
Originally Posted by joerg_rw View Post
[2014-03-25 04:45:53] <DocScrutinizer05> I for one don't mind what firmware is running on the modem. I assume it's doing nonsense over the air anyway, but then GSM is "nonsense" by definition and nothing you can do about it, since that's the way it works.
Pretty much so. The baseband in a UE is just the extension of the network and by itself it never does anything else than react to the RAN L3/L2 signalling. (only exception being maybe the cell update message, nothing else really originates from UE...)


Originally Posted by joerg_rw View Post
[2014-03-25 04:48:18] <DocScrutinizer05> what I worry about is whether the modem can do nonsense or rather rogue stuff to my *system*. Unlike recent shared-RAM designs of all modern smartphones, the modem CANNOT access the system on any openmoko-spirited phone, and Neo900 even implements tight monitoring of the modem so it can't even do anything sneaky without user noticing it. Apart from that I don't care what it actually does
Also true. There is absolutely no useful gain except financial reasons in having a chipset that has the baseband processing embedded in the main system. The cost gains in HW are largely offset by the SWDEV and integration costs of the system as it ends up as a monster block of binaries and functionality largely a black box to the device developers.
 

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