Breaking Ground

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Nicole Faerber

Sourceress

Latest posts by Nicole Faerber (see all)

• Unleashing the Librem 14 - July 6, 2022
• Librem 14 Rave - April 8, 2021
• Librem 14: Adding Librem EC, Freed Embedded Controller Firmware - February 22, 2021

We are often asked, why does the Librem 5 cost that much? Well, there are several reasons and I will try to explain the most important ones.

First of all, the design of the Librem 5 is unique in many ways. Most importantly the hardware is designed from the ground up by us and for us. The Librem 5 is a complete custom design, not based on any reference design, specifically designed with all the goals we all want to achieve – open, safe, secure, respecting your privacy and digital rights. This rules out existing mobile phone reference designs, like from MTK, Qualcomm and the others. When we first approached hardware manufacturers almost two years ago with this project most of them instantly said “No, sorry, impossible, we can not help you.”. Others warned us, that it could never work, that it was too complicated, “the industry does not do that” and so forth.

And yet here we are, later than we wanted, but we are actually shipping first hardware! It is possible but it comes at a price.

From-scratch Hardware Design

What made and makes the hardware design expensive are several things. First of all the lack of reference design. Most other phones (especially Android phones) are based more or less on reference designs of the chipset, (i.e. from the CPU manufacturers). If you go with a, say, MTK-based design, then the hardware design is more like going shopping. You pick some peripheral hardware choices like display, cameras, storage and very few other things. Your differentiator compared to other MTK-based phones are these choices and the customization of the Android system–as far as you can customize it at all. The nice part is that you get pretty much everything from the chipset maker. The SDK (Software Development Kit) or BSP (Board Support Package) comes with all the drivers ready to go, but beware, many of them are binary-only mystery code.

We did not have this luxury. We had to design the hardware from scratch and we also have to develop many drivers ourselves–everything that is not yet available as free software in upstream mainline Linux kernels. This also includes a lot of low level work we had to do for the support of the i.MX8M Quad CPU we chose. The i.MX8M was, at the time when we made this choice, still pretty young and mainlining its support in the Linux kernel had just begun. Some critical drivers were just barely starting to work, like the GPU support. Other mission critical things like power management, clock scaling (for the CPU, GPU and RAM) are just now starting to hit mainline and still need a lot of work. Peripherals like charge controller, accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer were only partially implemented. We had to work around bugs in the display controller of the i.MX8M to support the LCD and so on and so on.

Separated Chipsets

Current smartphone chipsets also make hardware design a lot easier since most of the critical components of a smartphone are already integrated into the main CPU, onto the single silicon die. This has lots of advantages but also a ton of problems concerning security and privacy. These integrated peripherals are sitting on the same silicon, tied tightly to the CPU. Complex parts like the cellular modem or the WiFi can access the very same RAM that is used at runtime to store your most private data, but at the same time they are controlled by binary-only firmware that no one except the manufacturer of that chip has access to. You have to trust that this firmware does not contain any malicious code to eavesdrop or spy on you. Trust in closed non-auditable complex computer systems is something everyone has learned the hard way we should not have. The news is full each day of zero day bugs and exploits throughout the stack–from applications to operating systems and even down to the very silicon the whole stuff runs on.

So we chose to separate the most critical parts from the CPU. The WiFi, Bluetooth and cellular modems are sitting on separate M.2 cards, separated from the CPU by defined interfaces (SDIO and USB) and–a Purism signature feature–can be physically switched off by hardware kill switches. All of that makes the hardware design even more complicated, more parts, more components, more interfaces. But we are convinced this is the only way to be as safe as possible.

Groundbreaking Work

This low level Linux kernel work and the hardware design work do not come for free. We started to research and develop this for the development kit in early 2017, the development kit started shipping in December 2018. We learned a lot from doing the dev kit and this experience is now going into the hardware design of the Librem 5 phone.

We were the first to announce, develop and deliver a Linux based mobile device development platform. Funny fact, a few months after we made the dev kit public others announced development boards following the very same principles (separating CPU and baseband/radios), using very similar hardware design ideas (like the 18650 battery holder) and some more details–even our hardware kill switches found new friends 🙂 We don’t mind this! We made this available, for free, to share, to study, to modify and to use for whatever others see fit. We made it available for the greater public good, to foster ethical products that protect digital rights and don’t exploit.

I am convinced we laid out a path and have been breaking ground, not only for the Librem 5 but also for other projects and products.

But this of course is expensive. The hardware with its separated peripherals costs a lot more just in parts alone than a comparable smartphone. The hardware design effort took many person months of hard work, a lot more than an off-the-shelf smartphone design would have cost.

The Software

And then there is the software. I already talked about all the Linux kernel work we had to invest in, to support peripherals, to tune things and also in parts to–frankly speaking–do NXP’s job in developing free software support for their CPU. Especially in the beginning (early 2018 and into 2019), it was pretty tough, but I also have to point out that NXP has heard us and many others and has significantly ramped up their Linux mainlining efforts – thanks!

But it is not only the kernel and drivers that we had and have to invest in. We also chose not to use a platform like Android, we chose to base on a system and platform that is maintained by a huge open source community, that is openly governed and to which anyone can contribute. We chose to use the same operating system base as we use on the Purism Librem laptops (PureOS), which is a Debian derivative. For applications and the graphical user interface we chose the same pattern: open governance, free software and active community and thus based on the same environment we use on our Librem laptops – GNOME.

In the beginning people called us crazy for that choice. It would be too much effort, there are alternatives (Plasma Mobile, Ubuntu Touch etc.) and that we would never make it with GNOME. Well, here we are, we are shipping with GNOME / GTK+ and we achieved exactly what we wanted: convergence between the desktop / laptop and the phone. Applications written for or modified with some care and not too much effort can now seamlessly run on the desktop and on smaller screens like the phone. This is simply amazing! And all of that with the same tools, the same programming environment and the same libraries and packages as on the desktop–truely write once and run everywhere (maybe having to recompile 🙂 ).

This convergence is a very unique feature now coming to PureOS. Quite a few have tried before us but did not get it this far. We created one of the first truly convergent environments: the same operating system base (Debian, deb packages), the same tools and SDK and the (pretty much) same applications for the desktop and the phone.

Again we are breaking ground, paving the way for many more to follow. All of our code is public, all our changes to upstream projects go upstream as soon as possible. The GNOME project has for a long time been thinking about mobile applications but never came around. Purism is making this a reality now, together with the GNOME community.

Only the Beginning

This development comes at a high price. We have a team of about 15 developers full time working on this for almost two years. You can easily figure how much money we already put into this, and we are not done yet. The release of the Librem 5 is only the beginning. We are committed to continue to develop the software and the hardware, this is not a single-shot project, this is breaking ground and making use of it afterwards.

With the release of the Librem 5 the story has just begun.

Discover the Librem 5

Purism believes building the Librem 5 is just one step on the road to launching a digital rights movement, where we—the people—stand up for our digital rights, where we place the control of your data and your family’s data back where it belongs: in your own hands.

Preorder now