Over 30 years ago, I was doing some OS9 (Microware, not Apple) development on a 68k embedded target. I needed a PIO driver that could do bi-directional I/O. The OS came with a PIO driver, but it wouldn't let you switch directions. I approached the vendor with several options:<p>1) I will pay you to write another driver with this functionality.<p>2) License the driver source code to me and I will do it.<p>For reasons I do not remember, they would not do either.<p>I ended up reversing their PIO driver and implementing a version with the functionality I needed. I was uneasy about doing this, but we never sold or distributed the work so it was probably legal. (The development was for an in-house application with just one target.)
such colossal public good.<p>kind of weird to me that we still have so few phones that have started running mainline. there's a lot of postmarketOS phones, but my understanding is they Helium/libhybris which mixes in a ton of the Android support infrastructure/drivers to do the job. i could be overly concerned, but there being so few distributions & such specific distributions targeting phones is exactly the good this work OUGHT to be unlocking, & it just seems like progress in making that happen is disorganized / not really happening, alas alas alas.<p>getting a toe-hold in, where we start to see self-determinism on what our devices run, would be such a compelling & powerful vision. i really hope we can start to see that!<p>ubuntu touch targets the Pixel3. i'd be curious to know what they did. PinePhone & Purism really took it from the top, have their own hardware that starts in a more easy-to-work with set up. but I don't see why that would be required to get a decent regular linux distro (arch, debian) running on a phone, with a gui (sans many device drivers!).
I don't understand why ARM don't just release the source to their drivers. Seems like they'd have a lot to gain and little to lose bu doing so.
This was good for a chuckle:<p>> On Android, we must cross-compile from a desktop with the Android Native Development Kit, ironically software that doesn’t run on Arm processors.
They probably could have avoided needing to cross-compile by using a chroot under Android. There are lots of tools, and also the manual way.<p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/ChrootOnAndroid" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.debian.org/ChrootOnAndroid</a>