this is like telling someone who wrote their own game engine from scratch that they're missing the hacker spirit because they rely on mesa to compile their shaders rather than writing their own compiler for every single GPU they support
heya, author of the blog post here. the op6 happens to work but it's limited to debugging in el1, if you do manage to trap in el2 all the registers read 0
the reason this works at all on this production device is because oneplus screwed up and shipped a "debug profile" in production. this is a vendor signed elf (flashed to the dpdb partition or something like that) containing configuration to enable certain debugging features.
the one we already know about is crashdump mode, the op6 will crashdump when you trigger an XPU violation or some kinds of bus abort, then you can dump the entire RAM and you dont even need to authenticate (no firehose just run bkerlers edl.py)
this has come in handy for mainline development a few times heh
but it seems that this profile also enables EUD which is super nice, that said i didnt manage to get breakpoints working at all yet....
If you have a device running postmarketOS or Alpine Linux you can try this out yourself with other Android apps. Just "sudo apk add android-translation-layer" and then run
$ android-translation-layer some-app.apk
I tried a few (F-Droid, Spotify, Megalodon) but they all failed with various issues, looks like there's a lot of API surface still not covered. Hopefully a lot of it is fairly easy to add now that the foundational work has been done!