Re: [9fans] GSoC 2021 project ideas

[hiro <23hiro@gmail.com>]

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.

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...

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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