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diff --git a/porting.rst b/porting.rst index 92dbd44..46a1af3 100644 --- a/porting.rst +++ b/porting.rst @@ -2,10 +2,36 @@ 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. |