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
    9716·
    1 month 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.

    • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
      2913·
      1 month 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
        165·
        1 month 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
          114·
          1 month 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.

    • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      15·
      1 month 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).

    • hexagonwin@lemmy.todayEnglish
      64·
      1 month ago

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

      • Libre Extremist@lemmy.mlEnglish
        71·
        1 month ago

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

        • erebion@news.erebion.euEnglish
          3·
          1 month ago

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