There is many hurdles to port Replicant in the Tegra 3 family of SoCs, especially the Microsoft Surface. One of them is Secure Boot*, and can be worked around via using kexec over the Windows kernel with the Surface RT(well, not The Right Thing, but works) The other is managing to get a new kernel(Linux 3.4 doesn't have ACPI on ARM support). Framebuffer support is not a problem, as UEFI provides a base framebuffer, which can be used currently with the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel doesn't provide a simple way to port to another ARM platform, unlike Windows(HAL extensions for porting Windows on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 for example, are just 30-50 lines) The problem is that the bootloader won't be free software, and that Windows is needed for boot(a support ticket has been filed for this, and is now at Tier-3 support in Microsoft headquarters). The bootloader is of course signed, or it won't be fun. The porting process is much harder than sunxi tablets(I have one) where you can put the sunxi-3.4 kernel and the right u-boot, making it work in a matter of hours/weeks(got the memory settings horribly wrong on my first try, but well). For bootstrapping, I will not care about USB/touchscreen support, but it's worth noting that you don't have access to a serial port, just a I2C(2nd I2C controller in the SoC) interface, it would be fun to do debugging over that :-) Crash dumps are written to UEFI firmware space, so I can access to them from Windows after a reboot. Android GPU drivers are boring, I can't write a working one(tried with adapting the VC4 GPU driver for Android, crashed at the Android Launcher due to poor memory management, memory leak)
*There is two backdoor keys for disabling Secure Boot but they can only be used in Boot Services(before the Windows kernel loader, winload.efi is started, my current exploit to run kernel mode code happens *just* after that(ntoskrnl.exe)). Thanks, _______________________________________________ Replicant mailing list Replicant@lists.osuosl.org http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/replicant
