On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 11:22:17PM +0200, W. Martin Borgert wrote: > Dears, > > a BoF session is scheduled for Tuesday 2018-07-31 13:30 [1]. > > I would like to discuss mainly progress (or lack of, depending > on project) since last year, e.g.: > > * Purism announced their plan to create the Librem 5 and were > able to collect more than 2.5 Mega-USD in short time! > > * The Pyra development is slow, but steady, as always, and it > seems, that both casing and electronics are in "The Final > Revision" stage now! > > * The GPD Pocket handheld is available and runs Debian just > fine! > > There are probably many more things going on. > Please, post them here and/or tell us at the BoF! > > Of course, a BoF is not a talk. Everything depends on you! > > Furthermore, there will be a promising talk by Kenji Shimono > about Debian on tablets (such as the GPD Pocket) on Sunday > 2018-08-05 14:30 [2]. > > Cheers and TIA for any input and participation! > > [1] https://debconf18.debconf.org/talks/2-debian-on-mobile-devices/ > [2] https://debconf18.debconf.org/talks/47-hacking-with-x86-windows-tablet-and-mobile-devices-on-debian/ > I won't be able to attend debconf this year, so will miss this BoF again. So far, devices specifically designed to run a GNU system have been brought up. Shelf devices held by millions today or those left in a drawer or thrown at the garbage have not been mentioned so far. I mean all those smartphones and other gadgets shipped with Android. I have not made much progress in the last year. I think I almost got graphics working with upstream kernel on one device at one point, but could not reproduce it. The guys working on postmarketos have been more fortunate than me on this regards. So taking advantage of what they have been doing makes sense. And tough luck, just today, the battery of the device I had made most progress decided to blow up. I just ordered another one, but may take the chance to work on other device, which was already running Debian on a downstream kernel I built myself. The point at what I was with the former device is that Debian was already running on top of an upstream kernel. I could use USB to get a serial console and network. So, it worked like a headless device. I wanted to get it working with a Debian kernel after that, and so started working on porting one of those bootloaders out there: uboot or barebox were my target. Why that? So, the shipped bootloaders on these devices (which may be hard to replace) will load a kernel from a GPT partition, where a dtb and initrd may be included. However, this partition is limited, on my device, it was around 10MB. So, this limits running the armmp kernel from Debian. One solution is installing a bootloader in that partition and make that one load the armmp kernel from /boot/. I made some progress with barebox, and was working and making progress on the mmc driver. One missing thing here is that the current kernel config does not support most of these devices: there is no qualcomm support yet. So, at least some tasks come to mind in this regards: 1) Talk to kernel team and get that config support. 2) Ship more device trees for these devices. 3) Get some support on flash-kernel. 4) Get some bootloader working for some of these gadgets. I know Vagrant Cascadian has done some work to support more ARM boards, and this is not too dissimilar to doing that. Just that would lay the groundwork to make those devices supported by Debian. Drivers, for example, would come as shared work with other projects, like postmarketos. Userspace work would mostly come from what Purism has been doing, or someone might decide to do the work to get plasma-mobile on Debian. Cascardo.
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