Google appear to have discontinued ARM MTE support on new Pixels

General News
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MTE support was introduced with Google Tensor with the Pixel 8 series.

GrapheneOS Unable to Complete Pixel 11 Port Due to Cut Security Feature
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I knew something was not going to go as planned with this Pixel 11. Time to ditch completely this company. Motorola QUICK!

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Kind of hard to believe as “MTE is an intrinsic feature that is part of all of Arm’s v9 CPUs.” and Google hyped MTE in their own blog posts plus the obvious security benefit.
Why would Google turn its back on that.

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This looks like the end of GOS on Pixels.

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GrapheneOS will drop Google Pixel exclusivity with 'major' Snapdragon-powered devices coming
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Good thing I didn’t get an 11.

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I know, right? I’m crossing my fingers that GOS made a mistake.

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Can someone explain why it’s not possible to implement MTE themselves? Isn’t the source there from prior Pixel versions to guide them?

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They can’t implement it themselves, since it is a hardware feature

We’re unable to complete the port due to lack of support for ARM hardware memory tagging in software, firmware and near certainly hardware.

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Nearly certainly gives the impression that they’re not 100% sure yet.

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MTE is definitely gone from the SoC boot firmware. It’s not usable without that and it appears it’s simply gone as a whole.

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117181058028642959

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I spoke too soon. Sorry! Fuck Google and their Pixel 11 series.

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I would imagine a fair number of people will be canceling their pre-orders.
Motorola is still at least 1 year away, and the quality of the first Motrola phone with GrapheneOS remains to be a mystery, so I think I won’t be upgrading for a while.

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With the other Pixel (9 and 10 especially) we will have at least 5 years of GOS update support in front of us so we’re good.

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Me losing my 6a was timed perfectly.

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The 10a has at least 6 years 6 months.

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Why wouldn’t they?

They also hyped their Rust-written DoH implementation that launched with Cloudflare and Google DNS support. What happened with expanding it to anything else?

Four years later and… Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Feature requests poking them about this are closed as “not planned” and it’s laughable.

I was planning on trading in my Pixel 10 for a Pixel 12 when the time comes. I was counting on GrapheneOS obviously being available for Pixel devices in the foreseeable future. But I guess I won’t be trading it in.

This will probably be my last Pixel. Fuck Google.

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