Plan9 and Pine

[Chris McGee <newton688@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2003 bytes --]

Hello All,

I'm not sure how many on here are aware of the Pine SBC's. There are a few
different variants of those. Now there are even pre-built laptops and a
phone. There is a plan for a tablet too. https://www.pine64.org/

From what I can tell the hardware is well documented, inexpensive and well
enough designed. There is a vibrant community that is currently working on
porting different Linux flavours to the phone. Once things are stable the
pine store will begin selling branded versions of the phone with the OS
pre-installed and a portion of the profit going to the community to
continue their work.

Has anyone managed to port Plan 9 to these SBC's? Does anyone have an idea
of how much work this would involve considering there's already 64-bit arm
toolchain in place and raspberry pi working?

Thinking longer term, might it be interesting or useful to this community
to support some of this hardware, even if it was just the Allwinner SoC's,
representing two of the SBC's lines, the original laptop, tablet and phone?
I wonder for example if it might spark some more interest for people to try
Plan 9 if they knew that there is a source of inexpensive and standardized
hardware and things work mostly out of the box.

I have some more far-fetched thoughts. Please, be gentle. :)

Perhaps this is an opportunity for the Plan 9 community to think what it
would mean to run in a phone form factor. From my experience with the
different phone OSes, there's quite a bit of similarity (home screens,
grids of "apps"). Maybe this can be done in more of a Plan 9 style,
simpler, smaller, more composable and no teletypes (or X). If the community
comes up with something then we have a hardware line capable of running it.
If the system is compelling enough to outsiders and a partnership is
established with the pine group then that might be an avenue to fund
continuing improvements.

And then, what about the tablet?

Thanks for reading.

Cheers,
Chris

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2320 bytes --]