> Have you ever started a project that should take a couple hours with a fifty dollar budget, and realized at the end you spent a whole month on it and spent close to a thousand bucks?
Ah man, costs aside, that's my last weekend and probably the next few ones as I've been trying to make my old Motorola Xoom tablet run a modern kernel. When/if that's completed, the return on investment will be a net loss.
Definitely! Already to have successfully compiled a working kernel is an achievement as most of my last attempts over the years failed. But I really want to satisfy those demanding user-space binaries who complains the kernel is too old.
It's quite satisfying to have grown from "struggling to build from source" to hunting 2.36 era patches and diving in the code to port it. A lot of actual learning in the process.
It'll all be worth it when you post about your hard work on hacker forums and get a deluge of angry comments telling you how you could have gotten thrice the power in half the time for 1/5th the cost.
Nice! Didn't knew postMarketOS. This[1] is mostly what I'm trying to do and their wiki make me think I might have underestimated the task. haha.. This seems to be a good place to try to contribute!
If I can convince myself to not fall into the rabbit hole of rebuilding my blog first, I'll definitely write about my porting efforts :)
A trick I've used is just start writing in plain text, then fix it up into Markdown later. If you've got a kernel building you're already way further in than most. Give me a yell if you need someone to bounce ideas off.
I meant except for the monetary part. Let's say, I've put about 20h in it and I expect it takes me 3 times that. Just counting the time put in that kind of project, the outcome itself isn't worth it.
Considering this is a 10 years old android tablet that cost at the time ~300$. I probably could have bought directly a more modern one which is known to be flashable with linux.
The sentence I cited resonate for me as I often dive in a project and follow in the rabbit holes even though I know it's a bit irrational to do it.
About how to do it:
- you first have to find every git repo that may have relevant patches for this or similar device. There's the one open-sourced from the manufacturer, Google has one dedicated to the Tegra chipset, with more recent stuff but without any specifics about that device.
- determine what parts are relevant: definitely the board definition, the drivers. But then, that file weirdly named which appears to handle interrupts? Well better take it.
- adapt to changes in kernel interfaces: I've only come across name changes for now, but you can imagine it gets more complex
- finally: compile, flash, test! And probably keep doing that for a few cycles.
Ah man, costs aside, that's my last weekend and probably the next few ones as I've been trying to make my old Motorola Xoom tablet run a modern kernel. When/if that's completed, the return on investment will be a net loss.