• they don’t support compiling the OS from source

    They literally have a whole instruction page for it on their official website: https://grapheneos.org/build

    What they don’t support is making modifications to GrapheneOS, compiling it, and then still calling it GrapheneOS. It’s not. You changed it, so it’s something else. It’s your own fork of GrapheneOS, so you should name it accordingly.

    there’s still the TEE you can’t access even with root

    Uh that’s by design? Do you even understand the purpose of a secure element and trusted execution environment, and how they work?

    and the OS filesystem is readonly to inhibit customization

    It’s read-only for security reasons. This is the default AOSP behavior. iOS/iPadOS and macOS handle this very similarly. This is the industry standard for secure devices. If you want to make modifications, the code is open source, you can freely modify the OS, compile it, sign it with your own keys and use it with full verified boot enabled.

    GrapheneOS promotes “verified boot” that stops you from doing many important things.

    Verified boot is a built in featore of AOSP. https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/verifiedboot

    • Limonene@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      They literally have a whole instruction page for it on their official website: https://grapheneos.org/build

      I’ve asked, and they don’t support you at all after you build it. You can’t get updates or packages from GrapheneOS. Compare to Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, etc., where you can compile your own newer package, install it, even replace core operating system components, and then seamlessly upgrade to the OS vendor’s version when they catch up.

      What they don’t support is making modifications to GrapheneOS, compiling it, and then still calling it GrapheneOS. It’s not. You changed it, so it’s something else. It’s your own fork of GrapheneOS, so you should name it accordingly.

      Even if you don’t modify it, they tell you not to call it GrapheneOS, and don’t offer any way to install patches, besides building it again.

      Uh that’s by design? Do you even understand the purpose of a secure element and trusted execution environment, and how they work?

      Yes, I understand it. I’ve opposed TPM from the start, and this is just TPM for Android. I don’t want a device that keeps secrets from me. I do want comprehensive backups, including all cryptographic keys. I should be able to access the TEE from my authenticated PC over SSH.

      I’m fully aware that Widevine won’t run on a device where the owner has control over the whole device.

      The code is open source, you can freely modify the OS, compile it, sign it with your own keys…

      I don’t have the resources to do this (PC nor effort). They recommend 100GB+ storage and 32GB RAM for building it, and you seemingly can’t do it incrementally, since you have to flash an entire operating system at a time. I want to modify one file, like the call recording xml file. (That file is from a previous operating system I had, but I can’t provide an example of niche cases like that for GrapheneOS, because I only ever used GrapheneOS for a few days, so I don’t know what kind of small modifications I would want to make.)