Re: [9fans] GSoC 2021 project ideas

["Ethan Gardener" <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Mon, Sep 20, 2021, at 9:23 AM, hiro wrote:
> i think the main reason people are willing to fall for the android
> platform is bec. there is no good long-term supply of updated phone
> hardware with backwards-compatible interfaces.

Probably, but when do Linux kernel interfaces remain backwards-compatible? :) I've seen the sysfs battery-monitoring files change beyond all recognition.

> a lot of qualcomm and mediatek chipsets are being built, but instead
> of documentation they only ship half-baked linux drivers, which are
> often not even mainlined.
>
> those linux drivers are already hard to make work on actual linux
> distributions, or even on android distributions.
>
> who wants to reverse-engineer the hardware over and over again based
> on such linux drivers...

Quite, but feeling such pressure may be based on a false perspective. I've had 3 phones in the last 8 years, and I've upgraded to avoid falling too far behind with Android rather than carrier changes or hardware failures. The first of my 3 phones is capable of 4G, so I could have upgraded only once or even not at all. It's still in perfect condition. If you're not concerned with keeping up with Android or feeding poor impoverished phone manufacturers and the many shareholders who depend on them, ;-) then upgrading once every 5 years is entirely fine and once every 10 years may be acceptable. I think that cuts down the workload a bit. :)

On the other hand, using parts of Android is a way to make use of hardware you already value. I keep trying to think of ways to use my 8 year old phone because it's the only phone I've ever had with adequate sound quality. Perhaps I should just ask about sound quality on... maybe XDA forums or something.

> On 9/20/21, Ethan Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
>> tl;dr: forget inferno, port plan 9 to the pine phone.
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 20, 2021, at 6:43 AM, Dave Eckhardt wrote:
>>> > Anyone know if this project went anywhere?
>>> >
>>> > https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~412/lectures/L05_Purge_Proposal.pdf
>>
>> I had to laugh at one of the slides. Inferno running natively on "x86
>> supercomputer"? I think implementing multicore support would be a first
>> step, not to mention 64-bit! While it would be nice if those jobs were done,
>> they will take time and effort. Overall, if porting natively, I see little
>> sense in preferring Inferno to Plan 9, especially as Plan 9 already supports
>> 64-bit multicore.
>>
>>> Sadly, not.  One issue is that modern Android releases don't
>>> support 32-bit executables, and at the time that project was
>>> attempted Inferno was somewhat 32-bit (I haven't looked since).
>>
>> Recalling the issues Hellaphone had and the time it took, I'm of the opinion
>> that getting Inferno to work on any given phone's Linux kernel is hardly
>> more worthwhile than porting it directly to the hardware. The kernels have
>> undocumented interfaces.
>>
>> A current thread on OSdev (operating system development) forums is looking
>> at phones. It's a little rambly, but it reports on some encouraging things.
>> Lots of "baseband processors" (the phone-network communication subsystems)
>> have documented interfaces. There are at least 2 phones available now which
>> are fully open for operating system development: the PinePhone and the
>> Librem 5. (5 is the screen size.) Of the 2, the Pine Phone seems better, not
>> least because it can boot from the SD card; useful for testing.
>> https://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=53251
>>
>> There's also the option of building your own phone out of components. The
>> thread has some info. I'm guessing most here would prefer a PinePhone.
>>
>>> But I think I saw some recent-ish Inferno-on-Android activity here:
>>>
>>>   https://github.com/bhgv/Inferno-OS-bhgv
>> 
>> That's probably a good source of code. bhgv is a freelance programmer who
>> was very interested in Inferno and made several improvements including
>> Truetype fonts. The last I heard was he tried to find paid work involving
>> Inferno but couldn't, so he didn't have time to work on it.

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