> is available for all but the most up-to-date Kindles
Bought one from eBay to try it out. Silly me connected it to wifi and suddenly it’s up to date and no longer breakable
replies(6):
Bought one from eBay to try it out. Silly me connected it to wifi and suddenly it’s up to date and no longer breakable
Kobo devices have root exposed but don't let users boot their own kernels (and the kernel they ship was not compiled with kexec either).
I really don't know the reason so many devices these days don't have an unlock method. It seems predatory. Who knows where in the chain this happens... maybe it's Kobo, or maybe MediaTek won't sell you their SoCs for mass-market devices unless you lock them.
If you can do either of those, it should be trivial to get kexec working by just loading it as a module.
If the real impediment is lack of demand or low-level development effort for any given device, that's in principle a solvable issue once projects like pmOS and Mobian choose to focus on some reasonably-available hackable hardware and bring it up to true daily driver state.
- Getting the device's BL1/BROM into download mode (where it waits for an upload of a Preloader/BL2 from outside), for these devices itself does not involve exploits. Kamakiri is an exploit in the upload process that gives an execution point at that stage.
- The BROM on Kobos (at least the old ones, P365's) don't have security enabled as far as I know. (Unless somehow they are lying to us when we ask, which there is no evidence of). They only do some integrity checks (header magic #s, checksums).
- Security on Kobos happens down the chain, starting at the Little Kernel apparently jumped to from the Preloader. I am still learning about the Clara BW's boot process.