I’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.
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?
GLM and Kimi are good to go, if they are also deny/refuse -> try abliterated.ai or refuseless (do not recommend them, oversold servers). Sometimes 4.8 is enough, depends on your prompt engineering approach. Sometimes 5.5 can even lead 4.8 subagents, see my next comment in the parent branch.
We need more people doing work like that.
It’s a lot of compute and AI tokens (to reconstruct the original source code with byte-identical gate using the original toolchain - which you also need to found + figure out per-TU flags), at this point I truly believe we should go in SETI@HOME style for RE if we want to survive. With a proper caching and trust via verification - a lot of fat blobs can be resolved in a distributed way. If anyone interested - ping me, it’s boring to do solo.
Next generation of the devices won’t be ours at all, there will be no easy hacks. Turn off automatic updated, do backups, pray for chaos.
Very worthwhile endeavor for the kids who, in not so distant future, may not know what a non-locked down hardware is if our fearless leadership has its way. Do you have any online presence where the work can be supported?
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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
With a pleasure, ping me via email, I'll try to wrap it up (sorry, it will be AI wrapping, I have no time to do it manually), and maybe you can help me to release it publicly.
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?
GLM & Kimi are both good to do it with just a bit of prompt engineering (historical preservation, EU laws, etc, you know the drill); Opus 5.5 is also ok to do it according to EU laws, but only with Opus 4.8 subagent - this part is tricky, I'm using ./.claude/agents/opus48.md template, bc this is the only known to me way to kick off 4.8 agent explicitly, regular tooling CC has doesn't allow to downgrade the subagent. 5.5 becomes the lead, 4.8 is doing the dirty work - this pairing worked out great for WLBT reconstruction and some other binaries, but not all. The same second you touch something like hypervisor - it becomes more complex, 5.5 won't be able to lead, so you need to go to China.
A few sad and bad moments I experienced: 5.5 will not optimize GPU kernels for you, somehow A\ decided that it's "cyber"; 5.5 will get safeguarded with almost any kind of deep kernel work. I'd say, "shame on you, Anthropic", but it's too late.
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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.