On Thursday 14. June 2018 17.54.56 H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote: > > What are you currently working on (wrt. to Tinkerphones)?
I thought I should finally respond to this in some way. As some people following the rather exclusive Lenny400 mailing list (for the Letux 400 notebook computer) as well as the Letux-kernel list may already know, I have been looking at the L4 Runtime Environment and the Fiasco.OC microkernel: http://www.boddie.org.uk/paul/L4Re-Fiasco.OC.html http://www.boddie.org.uk/paul/Landfall.html This has some kind of relevance to this list because L4-based operating systems are widely deployed on smartphones. Certain devices employ L4-based technologies for managing security-related functions, and it seems to be the case that these technologies are also used for virtualisation, meaning that the "visible" operating system on various phones might not be running on the bare metal (as people might have assumed). My own interest in this is to experiment more freely with device drivers and to potentially build up a "multiserver" operating system, but there would be a lot of work involved in doing so, despite all the work already done by projects like L4Re and the background Free Software ecosystem. At one point, as some of you may also know, there was an effort to port GNU Hurd to one of the L4 kernels [*]. Either way, developing such things provides some element of choice and flexibility with regard to the software used on our devices. (I also started to find Linux-related development a burden. It was informative to improve the Letux kernel support for the Letux 400, but my development hardware is probably not up to the task of juggling kernel source repository branches, at least in the way I end up doing so. I also don't really care for the way Linux kernel development seems to be done, either.) Of course, this is all rather tangential to Tinkerphones. I guess it would be interesting to deploy the software described above on phone-like devices, but without the software being more complete, those devices would merely be interesting deployment targets and not much more. Not that such experimentation was beyond the scope of things like Openmoko, as I seem to recall. > What do you expect from doing this? What are you missing > most? What should happen to make you contribute here more > actively? I generally don't expect very much from my endeavours. I suppose more enthusiasm for the cause of open, ethical, sustainable, privacy-respecting computing devices would be generally welcome, but I think that many people are in the realm of "good enough" with respect to the devices they use, and they perhaps don't see much point in supporting alternatives if the level of inconvenience is too great. But with regard to contributing here more actively, more communication would be good in general. I think that many mailing lists and forums tend to become highly specific to certain technologies, and broader discussion on more general topics just doesn't have a home anywhere. I have experienced this with various other projects of mine, but I probably make things difficult for myself in pursuing my own course. Certainly, I feel that venues like this list are vital and that people should feel able to use the list to share what they are working on, even if their progress is not always as encouraging as they might want it to be. More communication, even about the setbacks people experience, would make many a crowdfunding campaign go better, and I don't think this community is so different fundamentally. Paul [*] I personally think that this work would be more readily approachable now, given various desired or necessary but absent features having been provided by some L4 variants, but I think people abandoned L4 and started to work on other things, forgetting to check back to see if their assumptions were still valid. _______________________________________________ Community mailing list Community@tinkerphones.org http://lists.goldelico.com/mailman/listinfo.cgi/community http://www.tinkerphones.org
