AI can speed up a lot of the manual labour needed to bring even an almost dead, 10-year-old device back to life. My Xiaomi Mi Max 2 (oxygen, MSM8953) was dead. With AI help and my own knowledge, I ported/rewrote the missing drivers, and it now runs Nura (postmarketOS) with working camera, torch, SIM, phone calls and SMS. Only the loudspeaker is still broken.

Everything is up for anyone who wants to install it, or to understand the changes and manually write the patches for mainline: https://github.com/sv1sjp/mi-max2-oxygen-msm8953-nura-drivers Testing, feedback and PRs welcome.

  • erebion@news.erebion.euEnglish
    10116·
    3 days ago

    “AI” can also speed up the process of making a code base buggy and hard to debug, when the people that generated it do not understand the code.

    Nura will not accept generated patches, by the way. It might run your own version of Nura, but will not run upstream Nura with your patches.

    • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      12·
      2 days ago

      Nura will not accept generated patches, by the way.

      If you click OP’s github link and scroll down you’ll find this section which acknowledges that: https://github.com/sv1sjp/mi-max2-oxygen-msm8953-nura-drivers#about-ai-assistance-and-contributing-upstream

      The drivers, patches, scripts and write-ups here were produced in collaboration with an AI assistant and tested on a real Mi Max 2 (oxygen).

      The Nura project does not accept LLM-generated contributions. One of its maintainers explains the reasons in this post: the social and environmental cost of these models, and the risk that people use them to produce private knowledge instead of joining and strengthening the community whose work the models learned from. We respect that decision. So:

      • This repository is not a contribution to Nura or pmaports, and its code should not be submitted there as it is.
      • It is public documentation, not private notes. The reusable part is the knowledge: how the hardware is wired, register addresses and meanings, root causes, what was tried and ruled out, and how to test safely. These are facts anyone can check on their own device. It can save time for anyone who wants to understand what works and what does not, and then write their own code to submit upstream.
      • If you want to get this into Nura or upstream, learn from it, verify it on your hardware and write your own implementation, following the rules of the project you contribute to (Nura, the Linux kernel and libcamera each have their own contribution policies).
      • Please engage with the community. The Nura wiki, the msm8953-mainline project and the people credited below did the groundwork this builds on.

      @OP (@sv1sjp@lemmy.world) what isn’t clear to me is why you don’t try to upstream the kernel parts, since Linux is accepting LLM-assisted contributions (as is Nura actually, just only indirectly after their upstreams like Linux accept them).

    • Shayeta@feddit.orgEnglish
      5411·
      3 days ago

      Yeah, I personally prefer the bug-free old version:

      On a more serious note, we’re still in a period where people are figuring out what AI can/cannot be used for and what the best practices are. Ironically, since it’s better at reverse engineering and bug hunting than developing when compared to a human, it is more useful for hacker and open-source projects than enterprise.

      • altphoto@lemmy.today
        144·
        2 days ago

        Also Google destroyed a huge chunk of Swedish forest to build a data centers for more AI… That’s the main feature of AI. Figure that one out.

        • ffhein@lemmy.world
          2·
          6 hours ago

          *Finnish forest

          It’s Palantir (or maybe it was just of one of the founders?) that bought a large chunk of land in Sweden, but to my knowledge they haven’t made their plans for what to do with public

        • erebion@news.erebion.euEnglish
          51·
          2 days ago

          Sadly it’s an extractive technology and business model, those are not good for society.

      • erebion@news.erebion.euEnglish
        2115·
        3 days ago

        Well, we know the best practices for the Nura project:

        We forbid the use of generative AI tools in Nura.

        It’s literally the first sentence of their policy.

        since it’s better at reverse engineering and bug hunting than developing when compared to a human

        Citation needed.

        • Shayeta@feddit.orgEnglish
          137·
          3 days ago

          It’s literally the first sentence of their policy.

          Yes, but what about the 2nd sentence?

          The following is not allowed in Nura:

          • Submitting contributions fully or in part created by generative AI tools to Nura.
          • Recommending generative AI tools to other community members for solving problems in the Nura space.

          As you can see, it says nothing about researching, troubleshooting, reverse-engineering, etc. As long as you write and understand the code yourself AI is allowed for everything else. As long as you’re not using generative AI it’s fine.

          Citation needed.

          My personal experience working with AI over the past year. And if that’s not enough, here’s also Linus Torvalds himself.

          The arguments regarding resource use and profiting off of theft are valid. The arguments regarding the nature and capabilities of the tech are not. Developers ARE responsible for the code they submit, regardless of how it was created.

          • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMEnglish
            4·
            2 days ago

            As you can see, it says nothing about researching, troubleshooting, reverse-engineering, etc. As long as you write and understand the code yourself AI is allowed for everything else. As long as you’re not using generative AI it’s fine.

            I’m not sure if you’re joking or legitimately confused, but, assuming the latter, fyi the “AI” that people use for “researching, troubleshooting, reverse-engineering, etc” is part of what is called “generative AI”. Given this, it’s not much a stretch to read it as saying that even posting in Nura forums about the existence of @sv1sjp@lemmy.world’s github repo would actually be a violation of Nura’s policy (as of today; I expect it will evolve in the not-too-distant future).

            • Shayeta@feddit.orgEnglish
              2·
              2 days ago

              That’s fair. It would certainly align with the described “spirit” of the policy. Hopefully it becomes clearer in the future.

          • erebion@news.erebion.euEnglish
            69·
            3 days ago

            It’s not a good tool for research, it will just generate a hallucination and you end up doing something which does not work or just works somehow, but is not done correctly and will break in the future.

            I talked to quite a few people recently at the postmarketOS and Alpine Linux conference, it definitely was noticed that more contributions are now coming in that do things wrong or in a subtly broken way and the submitting people have no clue.

            If you rely on a lying computer for research, then your code will lie to you.

            • sudoer777@lemmy.mlEnglish
              81·
              2 days ago

              I’ve used AI for low level debugging on things that are basically undocumented to fix my personal machines, doesn’t eliminate the trial and error process but it’s gotten me farther a lot faster than if I were to do it on my own.

            • Shayeta@feddit.orgEnglish
              114·
              3 days ago

              I rely on it to scour the docs, the forums, the codebases for any and all potential solutions and neatly present them to me. I then validate and evaluate myself. Just going with the first thing the AI suggests is lunacy and is exactly what I meant by “people are still discovering best practices”.

              • erebion@news.erebion.euEnglish
                49·
                3 days ago

                Or just use Ecosia or DuckDuckGo.

                A search engine finds you places to look at and doesn’t hallucinate incorrect details.

                I know it’s perfectly possible to do mainlining of a device and work on the kernel stuff simply by reading stuff, asking people and bouncing ideas while strengthening the community in the process and having fun with other phone hackers.

                • Shayeta@feddit.orgEnglish
                  91·
                  3 days ago

                  Unless you’re doing something extremely common with well-established patterns, search engines have sucked for the past 14 years and been unusable for the past 8. For most of that time I would just refer to official docs, and official code examples, avoiding stackoverflow and other forums since they were just filled with outdated or plain bad info.

                  Search engines like Kagi might still be decent, but they are few.

                • sv1sjp@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
                  94·
                  3 days ago

                  Υes good luck finding solutions with closed source drivers by using only Search Engines and not at the end of the day…reverse engineering… I mean, technically feasible, but I cannot understand why we skip the HUGE AMOUNTS OF TIME that this kind of work needs to be done. And expertise.

                  The repository is here with an auto-installer script for anyone interested, the research is here for anyone to study and try to manually implement them to main-line. That’s the beauty of open source.

                  All in all, The device is alive again, so I would need to consume less new electronic devices in the feature so I will protect more the planet with not needing a new phone/smallserver than some data centers that I do not control!

        • Ptsf@lemmy.world
          1613·
          3 days ago

          What a genuinely antithetical stance to take on a project meant to keep otherwise dying hardware alive, but that’s the beauty of open source. You don’t have to give a damn about upstream, just fork and rebase into your own little niche and move on.

            • Ptsf@lemmy.world
              157·
              3 days ago

              The reasons stated are not immediate granted fact, nor are they all logical. Again, fork it and move on. Nura can have whatever policy they’d like, but it doesn’t make sense not to use a tool, that it should be obvious by now can accomplish the prototyping work of entire engineering teams. In a good enough fashion to create software for revitalizing what would otherwise be ewaste. To me that doesn’t sit well with their goals, at least as applied to this reality. You can have whatever opinion on it you’d like, I know there’s a cult of anti ai on lemmy and in open source software, and I do sympathize with some of their viewpoints and the legitimate concerns.

              • erebion@news.erebion.euEnglish
                22·
                2 days ago

                The post from Casey, linked by lenni, addresses exactly those points. It’s still extractive and hurts communities.

                • Ptsf@lemmy.world
                  62·
                  2 days ago

                  So is manufacturing new electronics. You don’t get a perfect solution, and frankly, local ai already exists that’s good enough for this type of prototyping. I’ve read through their reasoning and while I can sympathize, I do not agree with it. It’s not realistic or accomplishing their goals imo, but I maintain that’s the beauty of open source. Fork it. Move on. Thank them for their contribution.

        • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
          87·
          3 days ago

          They have given five reasons for not using AI:-

          • water and energy use
          • worker exploitatio
          • worker layoffs
          • use of other’s work without consent
          • not understanding what the code is actually doing

          Of these, the first is a result of using fossil fuels, the second and third are a result of capitalism, and the fourth is only a problem if you believe in the whole ‘intellectual property’ charade. Only the fifth is an actual issue with AI, and that can be solved by either mandating human review, or marking AI-generated code as such and letting users use or exclude it.

          • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de
            62·
            2 days ago

            You are forgetting that basically everything is de-facto capitalism. If you use this in Christiania, you step out to Denmark and suddenly you are no longer ethical because you are contributing to capitalism.

            Oh, and you are forgetting 6: can only be trained by data harvesting corporations. Open weight != open source.

            • erebion@news.erebion.euEnglish
              52·
              2 days ago

              Just that.

              There is no true life within a false life.

              The philosopher Theodor Adorno sums it up quite well.

              Slavery, for example, wasn’t solved by handing slaves over to nicer owners, but by ending it.

              In a similar way, it’s not possible to improve the world by using exploitative tools, you can’t improve something while destroying it.

              For example, not using text generators because of the fossil fuels that this will burn is a good point. Just because it could use electricity from sustainable sources, does not mean it won’t hurt humanity to use it.

              Just because it could be better does not mean it is.

              I decided to not have a car, because while those can be made to hurt the planet less, they do hurt the planet a lot. And there’s already public transport. Even electric cars aren’t better than taking the train. And I live in a place where this works quite well, so I do that.

              I can do better now, not in the future when LLMs might (or might not) better.

              I don’t buy products that will quickly be trash just because the companies could build bettee products. We have a choice.

              (Footnote: Adorno wrote that sentence looking at the fascist terror in Europe in the 40s. What he is saying, basically: You can’t do the right thing when you live in a system that punishes that. Try to start a protest against cruel Nazis and you’re dead. You can’t further understanding among nations under those circumstances.)

              Sorry for the wall of text, having lots of thoughts.

            • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
              1·
              2 days ago

              basically everything is de-facto capitalism

              I wouldn’t go that far. The majority mode of production of the world today is capitalism. But that doesn’t mean ‘everything’ is capitalism. Neither does it mean that the majority mode of production of the world will be capitalism tomorrow.

              The same applies to energy production from fossil fuels. In fact, there the transition (to renewables) is far more visible.

              If you use this in Christiania, you step out to Denmark

              Did you miss a connecting statement? What is Christiania?

              can only be trained by data harvesting corporations

              What is the problem here? The data-harvesting part or the corporations part?

              • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de
                1·
                2 days ago

                that doesn’t mean ‘everything’

                I said basically.

                Neither does it mean that the majority mode of production of the world will be capitalism tomorrow.

                Wanna bet? I close my eyes, sleep, wake up sometime (hopefully) then check.

                Christiania

                Intentional anarcho-communistic commune somewhere in the middle of Denmark. Denmark is fine with it because it’s making tourist money. It’s like a cool fact, like “did you know there’s a place where people avoid using money”. Obviously, they go out sometimes. Apart from that, stuff done there that is only “ethical outside of capitalism” isn’t ethical for the outside world. If someone does vibecoding there and considers it ethical for some reason but not outside (like the de facto lack of enforcement for intellectual property because it’s no longer needed), people outside still can’t use the work ethically. From what I’ve heard, they aren’t even really good with computers there, and I am not aware of any attempts to make their own.

                can only be trained by data harvesting corporations

                What is the problem here? The data-harvesting part or the corporations part?

                Both? Some people don’t want data harvesting yet it’s done. The CEO gets capital, so do investment companies and maybe some client companies.

                EDIT: even if the electricity is sourced “ethically” (no), the compute itself is attributing to climate change.

                • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
                  22·
                  2 days ago

                  I said basically.

                  Ah, so there are alternatives.

                  Wanna bet? I close my eyes, sleep, wake up sometime (hopefully) then check.

                  If you can sleep as long as Rip van Winkle, you might see it change.

                  (Obviously the error margins are huge, but I expect capitalism to stop being the majority economic system in the world in about thirty years. Emphasis on the ‘about’.)

                  anarcho-communistic commune

                  Okay, so mentally children. Expect nothing significant from them.

                  Both? Some people don’t want data harvesting yet it’s done. The CEO gets capital, so do investment companies and maybe some client companies.

                  I don’t think data harvesting per se is going away. Even in an ideal world, the state would need to collect a lot of data about people to efficiently allocate resources (i.e. budget correctly). As for corporations, the CEO getting capital, and so on, those are results of capitalism.

          • GeorgimusPrime@lemmy.world
            11·
            2 days ago

            “Intellectual property” is mostly a capitalist idea. To give a direct example of the harm caused by LLMs using others’ work without attribution or credit, there is the recent case in which one of the models was being portrayed as finding a mathematical proof which was actually in it’s training data. The original authors will not get the credit, academic support, exposure and funding they would have gotten otherwise.

            Also, even if information is not “owned”, it’s epistemology and source are an important part of it. Consumption by LLMs degrades the information by removing such metadata, and even worse hallucinating sources.

            • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
              2·
              2 days ago

              one of the models was being portrayed as finding a mathematical proof which was actually in it’s training data. The original authors will not get the credit, academic support, exposure and funding they would have gotten otherwise.

              If the original authors have published their findings somewhere (journal / conference / arXiv), they will definitely get the credit from other mathematicians.

              it’s epistemology and source are an important part of it.

              I don’t know about all AIs, but deepseek does cite sources. You can always cross-check them.

              • GeorgimusPrime@lemmy.world
                1·
                2 days ago

                Unfortunately the proof found by the LLM combines work by different teams of mathematicians that cannot individually be published as proofs. It’s the equivalent of a scoop in investigation journalism by someone who was spying on journalists instead of doing any investigating. It’s on lemmy/wired: https://lemmy.world/post/52843754

                It’s good that some do cite sources, however one major problem with generative AI is that it can produce volumes of output much faster than they can be verified. “You can always cross-check” is not viable at scale, and by the time LLM output gets cited, it becomes a quagmire potentially unlimited levels deep.

                LLM output should never be treated as original until they can show their work transparently.

          • eremophila@lemmy.zip
            12·
            2 days ago

            the fourth is only a problem if you believe in the whole ‘intellectual property’ charade

            wtf

          • erebion@news.erebion.euEnglish
            66·
            2 days ago

            I just hear “Let’s exploit others, it’s the fault of capitalism, not the fault of those driving exploitation”.

            That’s not how you make the world a better place.

            • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
              41·
              2 days ago

              You make the world a better place with the tools you have in this world. If you wait for perfect tools, you will get nowhere.

              In the case of AI, your choices are over whether and which models you use. Your choice has zero impact on what others do with it. Let us take OP’s case. Their choices are (1) run an AI for some time to make an older phone model usable for some more years, and (2) don’t, and have a bunch of people buy newer phones. In this case, option 1 is clearly the better choice, in terms of energy and water use, economics, etc.

    • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
      3413·
      3 days ago

      On one hand you don’t know what the code is doing but on the other hand it’s impossible to write so much code by hand and do any amount of testing for projects this big

      LLM code is getting less sloppy and you now have the choice between generating open-source projects which you will never read the code of, or using an artisan coded buggy project.

      Nobody has the time to test every single communication protocol manually to see when a camera is able to take pictures or a microphone records audio. LLM’s can do this driver development and even check when the result looks good. There’s soooo much tedious labour which can already be automated.

      OP managed to revive an abandoned phone with working drivers thanks to LLM development. That’s a massive win.

      • Libre Extremist@lemmy.mlEnglish
        166·
        3 days ago

        LLM code is getting less sloppy and you now have the choice between generating open-source projects which you will never read the code of, or using an artisan coded buggy project.

        If nobody understands the code, then I might as well use proprietary software, at least somebody will understand that code.

        • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
          134·
          3 days ago

          Too bad Android is locked down and the android versions on these devices don’t support a lot of modern apps.

          You can use Nura (PostMarketsOS) and have the LLM write the hardware drivers for your own phone which are missing from the project. This is often a pretty custom for most phones. Once you get the drivers you can use the rest of the OS like normal.

          You can now revive obsolete devices and get them useable. There’s probably some slop in there but the slop is really getting a lot better it would be great if people were more accepting for using LLM’s for extremely labour intensive tedious tasks which nobody would else do anyways.

    • hexagonwin@lemmy.todayEnglish
      64·
      3 days ago

      upstream linux does accept AI “assisted” patches. if this gets properly mainlined, why wouldn’t it run Nura?

      • Libre Extremist@lemmy.mlEnglish
        71·
        2 days ago

        Upstream Linux kernel doesn’t let people who don’t understand things to just submit. They have rules.

        • erebion@news.erebion.euEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          Yeah, if changes are requested and you don’t know what the kernel maintainers want from you, you’ve lost.

  • AnimalsDream@slrpnk.netEnglish
    92·
    2 days ago

    Huh, Nura? I like the name PostmarketOS better, but that’s just me.

    Cool that you got it working with ai, but I hope that doesn’t become a standard in device porting. Sure with proper vetting the code can be ensured to be maintainable, but that code had to come from somewhere. These systems don’t just magically know how to make software work, so it sounds like they’re probably just referencing code somewhere else that could be under any kind of copyright. Sounds like a legal nightmare waiting to happen.

    The thing I’m really hoping for is these general purpose mobile Linux systems being ported to the plethora of bootleg retro handhelds out there. The majority of these devices already have unlocked bootloaders and are super friendly to third party firmware. The problem is people are only porting these hyper minimalist emulation-focused Linux builds when there’s so much untapped potential.

  • BreakingBigfoot@lemmus.orgEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    I have a pinephone pro, seems like manjaro bricked it and I can’t flash the rom again …Any theories on what to do?

  • Grass@sh.itjust.works
    174·
    3 days ago

    any information on how you did it? Like what the setup was, what you asked the ai to do, etc. With the video game fusions people have been doing using claude lately I’ve become interested in AI for cutting out the most tedious, life wasting parts of reverse engineering but I haven’t seen examples involving hardware

  • eremophila@lemmy.zip
    3132·
    3 days ago

    Can’t the ai trash just f*ck back off to windows, apple, and google where they belong?

    Nura is an anti ai distro

  • PushButton@lemmy.world
    517·
    3 days ago

    The Chinese are going to save us once again? I never thought I would root for fucking China vs US in my life.