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A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

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Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#111

Post by fsflover »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #67
noodlesUK wrote: post #8

I would love to see regulation that required making bootloaders unlockable to enable this sort of thing. People have been making clusters of consumer hardware for decades: I’m sure people remember the PS3 supercomputers of the mid 2000s. I personally have lots of batch jobs like CFD simulations that could easily run on a fleet of phones with no real reliability issues, and I’d love to reuse old hardware and give it a…

Make it a seven year rule: hardware vendors must release necessary source code for firmware, blobs, etc. I think there should be a 20 year rule for all released commercial software to release the source code outside of national security concerns.

Seems like you may be interested in this petition: https://publiccode.eu

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#112

Post by m1333 »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #105
m1333 wrote: post #76

EMMC in phones has a finite lifetime and dies after a few years of use. That it is not mentioned in the article tells me everything I need to know about its seriousness

A few years? I have a bunch of phones from 2009 around that are still fully working and I have never had eMMC fail on any of them, and they use it for swap among other things. In my experience screens, batteries and USB ports fail much more often.

Phone from 2009 uses SLC, or MLC with large SLC cache, thus capable of at least 10k FDW (full disk writes).

Modern phones typically use TLC or QLC within a inch of their physical limits (signal to noise ratio), thus qualified typically only up to 500 FDW, which translates into several years of use.

There are other mechanisms at play which further degrade this number, such as WAF (write amplification) and others

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#113

Post by Aachen »

gruez wrote: post #62
zipy124 wrote: post #3

This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems preventing users from maintaining their phone with security updates, and very limited support length from OEM's leads to VERY insecure devices after they drop out of support. You should not be connecting these old devices to an internet accessible network. Google notably does well here with…

>This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems preventing users from maintaining their phone with security updates, and very limited support length from OEM's leads to VERY insecure devices after they drop out of support. Approximately nobody is throwing away phones because the OEM stopped providing security patches. They're doing it fo…

> Approximately nobody is throwing away phones because the OEM stopped providing security patches.

I thought that, but a surprising number of people think that no support means that their device becomes vulnerable on the very next day. Not all of them act upon it but that seems to be the understanding of people who know what a security update is (not my grandma, but my mom for example) but aren't real techies or just not in this area. And it's not like these people are installing non-OEM patches! Nice as that would be...

Some time before and during covid, I feel like security update awareness became a lot more mainstream. Maybe because there's not much else to talk about in smartphones anymore anyway, so you shift from "ooh this fancy new one has a fingerprint reader in the power button and its notification LED on the back!" to "I don't want a new one; which one can I use for the most amount of years to avoid this hassle"

Probably also a culture thing. I guess most people in low- and middle-income countries have other worries; I'm speaking from a northwestern european viewpoint

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#115

Post by Aachen »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #95
zipy124 wrote: post #3

This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems preventing users from maintaining their phone with security updates, and very limited support length from OEM's leads to VERY insecure devices after they drop out of support. You should not be connecting these old devices to an internet accessible network. Google notably does well here with…

Which consumer ever cares about "security" updates on phones?

Some fraction of the ones that use the phone for password storage and banking. The latter seems to be nearly everyone, the former is very likely if there's a techy in their lives but since maybe 5-7 years it also seems to be becoming quite mainstream

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#116

Post by Aachen »

jrmg wrote: post #69

It’s counter intuitive to me that this is a net carbon win. - Are these phone processors really as compute-pet-watt efficient as a regular data center processor? - There’s so little embodied carbon in a phone motherboard - and presumably some embodied carbon in whatever custom racking hardware up is being used to house these. Is that really compute-power-per-embodied-carbon-footprint efficient than making a new serve…

I don't have time for an elaborate sourced answer but in short, yes, the efficiency gains of modern devices is almost negligible compared to the CO2e of producing a new device at current device lifespans. I can't remember if you would have to use a device for 15 or 25 years before upgrading is better than continuing to use it, but I thought it was 25

Edit: yes, 25. Found my go-to reference for this quickly after all

> The report about the cost of planned obsolescence by the European Environmental Bureau [7] makes the scale of the problem very clear. For laptops and similar computers, manufacturing, distribution and disposal account for 52% of their Global Warming Potential (i.e. the amount of CO₂-equivalent emissions caused). For mobile phones, this is 72%. The report calculates that the lifetime of these devices should be at least 25 years to limit their Global Warming Potential. —https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#117

Post by MRaid »

II2II wrote: post #37
zipy124 wrote: post #3

This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems preventing users from maintaining their phone with security updates, and very limited support length from OEM's leads to VERY insecure devices after they drop out of support. You should not be connecting these old devices to an internet accessible network. Google notably does well here with…

The article seems to be fairly clear about this: it is Google focusing on Google phones (so unlocking the bootloader should not be an issue) and they did mention that the kernel would have to be replaced (albeit for other reasons). I would think the main factor against such clusters is cost. Even if the four year old phones are free, they have to be dismantled, tested, and supporting hardware/software has to be devel…

I pretty much agree with everything you said. But I think there is a chance for this to be commercially viable if it is offered in a different way. I,e not just raw cloud computing maybe you can run games on these clusters and jack the price a little. This is highly dependant on the virtual age of these clusters if they survive 10 of continuos work maybe there is a chance

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#118

Post by Aachen »

surajrmal wrote: post #51
Elfener wrote: post #46

Very weird that this is coming from Google, given that they made their phone platform specifically to not let you install your own operating system. And now, they're making it illegal to install custom apps too: https://keepandroidopen.org/

There is nothing about Android as a platform that forbids installation of your own OS. That's a phone oem choice and the fact Pixel phones can be unlocked proves as much. In fact this is the reason this project is even possible.

There isn't, but part of Google's requirements for using the trademark "Android" is iirc shipping a locked bootloader. If you also want to provide your users with the Play Store (many people will perceive the device as unusable without that), you also can't ship it with a su binary or something. It needs to come in a locked state where people only get user-level access, no permissions to read the data stored on there (outside of Downloads and DCIM and the like), no permissions to use TCP port 22, etc. Like the level of access many employers provide to non-tech personell as a device they don't own. As to why manufacturers are less and less often adding support for unlocking the hardware, I can only make assumptions

Google is requiring it be closed and leaving the unlock entirely optional. That's a choice

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#119

Post by Aachen »

m1333 wrote: post #76

EMMC in phones has a finite lifetime and dies after a few years of use. That it is not mentioned in the article tells me everything I need to know about its seriousness

Only the very cheapest phones still have eMMC. I bought a Pixel phone second hand last year and it shows the wear level of the storage somewhere in the settings. I forgot the number but it was so low, extrapolation got me to something crazy like maybe 20 or 50 years of expected use at that rate

That consumer rate isn't datacentre use, but not every task is write-to-persistent-storage intensive. You can also replace the sdcard and write to that instead if this is a worry (that's what I've been doing on my phones since I use them quite intensively; maybe that's overkill nowadays idk)

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#120

Post by Aachen »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #108
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #68

If only the phones could run a real Linux, let us bring our normal payloads of tools & scripts!

I've been using GNU/Linux as my phone OS for the last 18 years on several devices, enjoying "normal payloads of tools & scripts". Aside of a short time around 2017-2019 I never carried and relied on any other phone. It's not some wishful fantasy, it already exists and works.

Me too, but surely you also notice they're slowly raising the temperature of the pot we're in?
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