141
GrapheneOS not supporting Pixel 11s?
(grapheneos.social)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
141 points (98.0% liked)
Privacy
50658 readers
1196 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
It’s really easy to come to that conclusion.
Realistically speaking a team is trying to hit a set of requirements under a set of constraints when they design a soc (or any cpu if you wanna dive into the cisc world and see the wild variation in security featureset across even the same generation of chips). That means using existing designs with a die shrink or something is often the right choice when you’re shooting for the low cost portion of the market. The technology referenced here, enhanced memory tagging extensions, is a hardware implementation of tagging that requires a specific revision of the arm design and it’s a relatively new change (mte, the precursor to emte, is flawed and not used).
So it’s not by dint of wanting to fuck you over that the designers of socs would make one without emte.
I'm writing this on a Pixel 8 running GrapheneOS, which I'm pretty sure is a "recommended" device that supports all the security features and is also multiple generations old.
If new lower-end devices use die-shrink versions of previously flagship SoCs, as you say, then I simply do not buy the notion that there's any good reason not to put a die-shrink version of this SoC in a new lower-end phone.
I don’t have the datasheet in front of me but I’m almost 100% sure your tensor doesn’t have emte, which is the type of mte the graphene people are requiring for new devices.
From https://grapheneos.org/faq#recommended-devices :
There’s mte and emte (it’s actually way more complicated than that). Mte was shown to be vulnerable to some exploit which is partly why emte got released. The graphene os people were saying the whole time they need a new platform with emte not just mte.
Which is one reason why only the elite version of whatever qualcomm soc qualifies.
Your pixel 8 supports mte, not emte.
I don’t have a pixel 8 in front of me to perform this check on but you could easily disprove what I just said by checking proc/cpuinfo for ID_AA64PFR1_EL1.MTEX, ID_AA64PFR2_EL1.MTESTOREONLY and ID_AA64PFR2_EL1.MTEFAR or however cpuinfo reports them.
Those are the baseline implementation of enhanced memory tagging extensions, although there are more, and they’re completely optional silicon. Defined by a standard the tensor g3 processor in your pixel 8 adheres to but not required to be present.
E: I might be using some of the wrong language here for arm stuff. I spend more time in the esp world.
cat /proc/cpuinfogives me a bunch of copies of this (one per CPU core):Not sure how "MTE3" relates to "EMTE"...
Feat_mte4 is emte. You just have normal mte (it’s not just normal mte, mte3 means you also have mte2 and can do I think four different kinds of tagged memory management. It’s really powerful but it isn’t emte).
E: I just wanna toot my own horn here and congratulate me on correctly remembering details from someone else’s work while posting on the toilet. Not today cognitive decline, not today.