[Samsung Galaxy Note 8 Guides, News, & Discussion] BigCountry907:
My best guess would be no.

The dragonboard products are generally unlocked and made for development.

From what i have seen samsung security is fairly tight.

I think the only weakness is the ability to write anything to any partition.

My suggestion would be to find someone who has diligently backed up there device.

What i would be after is backups of the EFS partition.

Much irreversible data is written there.

So if for example someone has the EFS backup from a rootable version.........

and they also have a backup of the EFS on the updated version.

I would hexdump and diff those backups.

The theory being that the software version currently being run on the device is in that EFS partition.

Restoring the EFS partition backup from a rootable version of the software May and i say may allow you to roll back bootloaders.

If when installing the rolled back bootloaders the EFS partition is checked for the software version.

I do believe it is.

DO NOT and I seriously mean DO Not flash the EFS partition from someone elses device onto yours.

Things like the IMEI and Serial and other Personal non changeable hardware attributes are also stored there.

Now if you have the EFS backups from the same device with different versions of the software..........then.

In linux or possibly on the device using terminal......... Linux is best.

do

hexdump -C -v EFS.img

for both backups.

Then do

diff EFS-older.dmp EFS-newer.dmp

That should help you locate where in the efs partition the software versions are stored.

Find that and edit the efs of your device for the older software.

Then dont even boot into it.

Flash the efs by doing DD then boot download mode. If download mode shows old software version you did it right.

Odin in the older software.

Im not saying that i have done this. I have not.

Luckily i am still on version 2 bootloader.

I hate to upgrade to v3 bootloader at this point in time.

If and when i do upgrade to version 3 of the bootloader I will test this theory.

I can tell you for sure that the software version is present in the EFS.

Right now i am researching unlocking the Bootloader by modifying the EFS partition.

And of cource the persistence and persist partition.

If you

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/block/sda12

that is equivilent to turning off oem-unlock toggle.

if you

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/block/sda12

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/block/sda5

that is equivilent to turning on oem-unlock toggle.

Now when both the persisit and persistent partition are zeroed upon bootup the android system update writes some data to each.

Then booting back into download mode and notice that FRP lock is now OFF.

Dont get excited yet.

When all this is hapening there is data written to the EFS.

The data on the EFS tells the bootloader if it is or can be unlocked. << IT Isnt.

However if one can locate the changed bytes in the EFS by previously stated hexdump and diff.

Now you know where the bootloader is getiing the locked / unlocked state.

Since device is never alowed bootloader unlock the oem unlock toggle is for FRP reset only.

Meaning that the device software will write to the EFS the nessessary byte combination to allow FRP unlock.

But will never ever write to the EFS the byte combination that unlocks the bootloader.

So how then do we find what byte combination to unlock the bootloader?????

We use a device that is very similar and allowed to unlock the bootloader.

We use the data written to the EFS to allow bootloader unlock to edit our EFS to allow bootloader unlock.

Why will this work.

It might work because samsung is samsung and qualcomm is qualcomm.

Cost reduction through standardization is common practice.

Get what im saying :fingers-crossed: