alt Hacker News> Without hardware documentation, you're looking at decades of reverse engineering effort just to get somewhere half as far as an engineer with hardware documentation can get in a weekend.
I'm not sure this is true anymore and it is becoming less true with each new LLM release.
> No one cares about spending a decade reverse engineering the hardware on a Google Pixel or Samsung Galaxy.
Actually, this might a cool idea - just get a few super cheap smartphones, connect them all to a PC, give LLM access and tell it "make linux gud like android pls" and just give it a weekend.
Even if you have the binary driver and you decompile it with the help of a LLM, it does not provide most of the information from the documentation.
You may see that the driver writes some hundreds of magic constants in some hardware registers, but you do not know what they mean. You may be able to do exactly what the binary driver, does, but you will not be able to improve it, e.g. to enable features that happen to be not enabled in that driver.
So a LLM can speed up the initial part of reverse engineering if you have the files with binary drivers, which may be difficult to extract from certain phones, but a lot of work remains to discover all that the hardware can do.