Re: debian on acer tablets
On Sat, 2014-11-29 at 13:24 +0900, Joel Rees wrote:
> In the meantime, I want to ask again, what's the outlook for an acer
> a200 (nvidia A7 processor)? How much work would I be looking at to get
> a useable OS, if, say, I could extract the relevant drivers from the
> kernel source?
Debian's userspace should work on essentially any ARM platform which
meets the relevant ABI requirements, AIUI lots of people run a
(debootstrapped?) Debian userspace with a vendor kernel of some sort.
The main sticking point would be ancient vendor kernels, anything 3.x
should be fine though, I reckon (Wheezy had 3.2, by way of comparison).
It seems pretty likely that A200/A7 will meet the armhf requirements
(i.e. it's ARMv7) and so you ought to be able to run an armhf userland
on your own or the vendor's kernel.
(one thing I'm not so sure about is when the vendor kernel is an
"android" kernel. But I think those should still support "normal"
userspaces ok).
Getting formal support into Debian would be more work, starting with a
requirement for the platform to be supported by the mainline kernel,
i.e. cleaning/rewriting enough of the vendor stuff for upstream to be a
useful kernel on the platform.
As far as I can tell the A200/Nvidia A7 is part of the Tegra family,
which is a pretty actively maintained SoC family in the upstream kernel
(and u-boot, I think). However I don't see any sign of the A200 or
Nvidia A7 in the upstream mainline kernel source based on a simple grep.
I don't know if there is some other tegra/a200/acer community looking
into upstream support for such things, they'd be the ones to talk to if
they exist.
Ian.
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