Hey Hugh,
On 2/25/14, 11:30 AM, Hugh Tay wrote:
Hello everyone,
I would like to initiate a new open-source community project to port
FireFox OS to the Intel/AMD x86-64 platform.
There is lots of community work going on around Firefox OS and that
could well be brought together into a community umbrella project. This
is very much needed so as to concentrate our efforts, to provide a
single reference point for the various efforts, and to address the needs
of the community which are so low in the Mozilla priorities. There is
lots of work going on in South America already so bringing that into a
common project would be doable.
As far as x86 is concerned, are you aware that the new geeksphone is
running on an Intel chip? That should provide the starting point for
your work once (and if) they release the source for that port. I
suspect, without basis, that Intel may have some resources behind the
port as well since they are trying intensely to gain a foothold in the
mobile device space, so there may be help for your effort. Certainly
Geeksphone will be behind the x86 port. The phone has not yet shipped
but I suspect binaries will eventually be available on
https://downloads.geeksphone.com/ (with a bad certificate)
or
http://downloads.geeksphone.com/ (unsecure)
although I am not sure where the source code of the port will live. That
work, if available, would surely be a place to start since it will be a
working port to x86.
I'm thinking along the lines of the port for RasPi that Oleg Romashin
developed - executing Gecko on top of a vanilla Linux kernel with
only the essential drivers/libraries loaded.
Supposedly this method would let us run FF-OS on an x86 PC like other
Linux distros; e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora; just that its UI would be Gecko
instead of KDE or Gnome.
This way we should also be able to reduce our dependence on Android
as the backbone of FireFox OS.
The dependence on 'Android' is more at the level of build infrastructure
than anything else. There is a 'fake dalvik' needed for some reason I
have not yet understood. Apart from that 'AOSP' is merely a convenient
place to get source code and the NDK is simply used as a build
infrastructure for the project. The code for Gonk is essentially
linux + rootdisk binaries + firmware + glue
so that 'Android' should not cause you concern. With a clean, well
designed build and configuration system, the original source should be
changeable at will.
cheers,
~adrian
Perhaps further down the line we could also take advantage of UEFI
booting and B2G in < 10 seconds?
Would anyone be interested in contributing to this effort?
Looking forward to an exciting time ahead!
Hugh _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing
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