GOS Forum Post
A phone without security requirements of the official Project shouldn’t be called GOS. It’d merely have some features inherited from GOS. It wouldn’t have the whole security model which is required for any device running GrapheneOS.
Basically just this and what @yes quoted, it’s a nice idea but part of what makes GOS what it is, is the hardware. Without meeting the hardware requirements and not getting updates to various things, it’s just counterproductive.
- hardened_malloc — causes boot loops on devices with 39-bit virtual address space. replaced with AOSP Scudo.
- Auditor — requires hardware attestation which doesn’t work on GSI
- mtectrl / misctrl — Pixel-specific memory tagging control; breaks vendor TEE drivers
- USB protection — the low-level USB port controls rely on Pixel-specific hardware and are non-functional on other devices
- native debugging protection — not ported; breaks compatibility with root solutions and vendor debugging tools
RestlessOS is an unofficial, unaffiliated fork of GrapheneOS packaged as a Generic System Image (GSI) for Project Treble devices.
And from the GOS FAQ
GrapheneOS does not support being used as a Generic System Image, which only exists for development/testing purposes and isn’t usable for GrapheneOS since we require kernel changes and the userspace part of the OS cannot run on top of a kernel without the required functionality. The generic targets simply run on top of the underlying device support code (firmware, kernel, device trees, vendor code) rather than shipping it and keeping it updated.