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authorbnewbold <bnewbold@robocracy.org>2015-01-07 03:03:21 +0000
committerbnewbold <bnewbold@robocracy.org>2015-01-07 03:03:21 +0000
commitcd6926f3691e7ee9f7315c9d42eed8202b3922ad (patch)
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parent1a2cec73baaef989ceef2911af376e8eb8245e39 (diff)
downloadnovena-guide-cd6926f3691e7ee9f7315c9d42eed8202b3922ad.tar.gz
novena-guide-cd6926f3691e7ee9f7315c9d42eed8202b3922ad.zip
porting: initial notes
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Porting Operating Systems
============================
-.. note:: This page is a work-in-progress stub.
+In general, if trying to port things to the Novena, a good place to start would
+be finding existing ports to other hardware platforms based on the Freescale
+i.MX6 processors. Eg, the Wandboard, the Gateworks Ventana, the Solidrun
+CuBox-i4Pro, and Boundary Devices' Nitrogen6.
GNU/Linux Distributions
--------------------------
+It should be reasonably easy to port arbitrary GNU/Linux distributions to
+Novena. Either the existing microSD boot partition, u-boot, and kernel can be
+used (with the distro rootfs on a SATA disk), or an entire fresh image could be
+generated. Many of xobs's patches to the Linux kernel have been upstreamed to
+mainline, which helps immensely.
+
+Additional work will be necessary on non-debian-based distributions to port the
+userland utilities for things like EEPROM access and pulseaudio support. All
+these utilities are of course free software, and can be found by poking around
+on the Novena wiki (try starting at `Novena packaing overview
+<http://kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_packaging_overview>`_).
+
+Some earlier work had been done on an `OpenEmbedded build
+<http://kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Building_novena_firmware>`_.
+
Other Operating Systems
--------------------------
+
+Wikipedia `states <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.MX#Software_solutions>`_
+that basic i.MX6 support has been included in FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Android.
+There is probably also vendor (Freescale) support for some proprietary
+industrial operating systems like QNX and VxWorks.
+
+Beyond that it will probably be a matter of studying the documentation and
+refering to the Linux implementation for pointers.