MTE support was introduced with Google Tensor with the Pixel 8 series.
I knew something was not going to go as planned with this Pixel 11. Time to ditch completely this company. Motorola QUICK!
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.
This looks like the end of GOS on Pixels.
Good thing I didn’t get an 11.
I know, right? I’m crossing my fingers that GOS made a mistake.
Can someone explain why it’s not possible to implement MTE themselves? Isn’t the source there from prior Pixel versions to guide them?
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.
Nearly certainly gives the impression that they’re not 100% sure yet.
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.
I spoke too soon. Sorry! Fuck Google and their Pixel 11 series.
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.
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.
Me losing my 6a was timed perfectly.
The 10a has at least 6 years 6 months.
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.
Thank god I got the 10 Pro XL and didn’t wait longer. This Pixel I’m using now will have GOS support for years to come, but I’ll likely be switching to their Motorola phone implementation in a couple of years.
Yeah, I’m surprised that DoH is still limited to Cloudflare and their own DNS service. I guess Google really doesn’t want people to use DoH unless it’s with those two services.
Just my two cents. From a non-tech person, this seems like GrapheneOS is just saying this because they want to hype up their Motorola phone that’s coming out. I’m sure the Pixel 11 supports this, the team at GrapheneOS just doesn’t want to put any time or effort into it. And also, they want people to buy their new Motorola phone when it comes out.
Again, this is just my opinion. I’m not saying it’s true, it’s just, if you connect the dots, this seems most likely.
I would find it very hard to believe that the GrapheneOS team would outright lie about something like this. Further, as discussed in previous replies here this is not as simple as something GrapheneOS can impliment themselves.
If it is gone from the hardware and firmware then there is nothing the GrapheneOS developers can reasonably do to bring MTE to the Pixel 11.
I will say that I can understand some skepticism around this situation, and can also understand the perception that the GrapheneOS developers are “giving up” on pixels now that they have the partnership with Motorola. However I do not believe that comes strictly from a place of “wanting people to buy their new Motorola phone”.