On Thu, 29 Oct 2015 11:37:56 +0100 "Mohamed Mediouni" <mmedio...@gmx.fr> wrote:
> There is many hurdles to port Replicant in the Tegra 3 family of SoCs, > especially the Microsoft Surface. [...] > The bootloader is of course signed, or it won't be fun. We're desperately in need of supported devices with a free software bootloader that users can modify. As I understand it sunxi tablets have unsigned bootloaders and a strong community (despite the lack of hardware vendor support). So the idea would be to port Replicant to one of such tablets, and then to find a way that would permit people to buy compatible tablets easily. Paul had some ideas on how to do that. Assuming that the device is supported by mainline Linux, it boils down to: -> Making the bootloader load the right dtb, the bootloader image would be device specific anyway so that is probably doable easily. If you use an upstream version, you could even build different images from the same source. -> Have a common kernel with one dtb per device. -> Have a common rootfs, if the kernel version is the same, then you avoid issues where BIONIC is compiled against a specific kernel version. Then, as I was reminded on IRC, some device specific libraries can automatically be loaded on the specific device based on their filename, like gralloc.<device>.so, I guess that it requires the right init.<device>.rc to be run, and I wonder how that's selected with the device tree. I would guess it was something like a grep to /proc/cpuinfo before, I didn't verify that. Shipping them all the libraries would of course make the rootfs bigger. We could delete the unneeded ones at first boot though. -> For WiFi modules loading, we could ship the drivers inside the kernel image, it will consume a bit more RAM though. I wonder if we need to adapt userspace to not load anything and use the standard kernel interfaces. -> There might be some config files stuff too, like audio config, input config etc... I don't remember their path nor filenames. -> There might be some other stuff that I overlooked. Denis.
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