BSD on a phone? reddit / BSD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Current_Hearing_6138 · 2022-01-06 21:26 I ditched smartphones a few months ago. Rather than letting them collect dust, I would like to put bsd on them and use them as pocket computers. Is this even possible? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- k_o_e_n · 2022-01-06 21:29 AFAIK the only reasonable phone with BSD running on it is….the iPhone. Ok ok ok, iOS, MacOS is a derative of BSD. Edit: you might have a look at the PinePhone ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sandiego427 · 2022-01-06 21:29 I would be interested in checking out netbsd. They put that stuff on toasters. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2022-01-06 21:33 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CNR_07 · 2022-01-06 22:05 No phone is targeted at \*BSD. The best \*BSD compatible phone is probably the PinePhone PRO. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PunishedRaion · 2022-01-06 22:26 macOS is partially BSD-based (but mostly Mach-based) but we don't have much documentation on the underpinnings of iOS. It isn't FOSS, and it could be entirely different than the Darwin underpinning of macOS. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bluGill · 2022-01-06 22:27 Sure it is possible. Without knowing what phone it is I can't say more. Some of them your step one is either crack the built in encryption, or replace the boot loader chip - while not impossible it is difficult enough that people in the know won't even try. Other phones will let you load your own OS and the linux drivers exist to work from, if that is the case you just need to port BSD - good luck it is now possible but not easy. Your best bet is to start from a pinephone, at least the company behind that one wants you to succeed, though it is still a hard problem. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PunishedRaion · 2022-01-06 22:28 You could probably grab an old Symbian/Maemo phone and install NetBSD on it, but as far as phone GUIs etc. there's not much. You would be completely on your own. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PunishedRaion · 2022-01-06 22:28 macOS pre version 10 was not BSD in pascal, it was a completely graphical OS written in pascal with cooperative multitasking. UNIX has been preemptive multitasking since the 1970s. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- VENTDEV · 2022-01-06 23:02 > I ditched smartphones a few months ago. Rather than letting them collect dust, I would like to put bsd on them and use them as pocket computers. Is this even possible? For the most part, no. Not unless your a hotshot programmer wanting to bring it up from scratch. In which case, there are probably many other projects more important than old phone support. But whatever floats your boat. You might want to look at PostmarketOS to put linux on them. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- VENTDEV · 2022-01-06 23:06 > iirc, pinephone is targeted at loonix Incorrect, Pinephone is just a foss phone with good documentation. Sure, most of their donations goes to Linux developers, but Pine64 themselves don't fund very much work. They're agnostic to what you do with it. That being said, if I recall, there was a rudimentary effort to get NetBSD up on a PinePhone. http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port- arm/2020/03/31/msg006602.html (I believe there is some more recent, but this is what I could pull up quickly with just a basic search.) Of course, efforts to get it usable as a phone is a completely different story and very unlikely to happen. Pinephone Pro might be a more likely candidate, since it is RK3399, same as Pinebook Pro, it will probably be easier to port NetBSD to it. (NetBSD runs very well on PBP, except for Wifi. We're hoping the new wifi stack in NetBSD 11 cures that.) But again, actual phone use is unlikely. Although who knows, stuff might seep slowly into NetBSD over time via Pinephone's efforts. Edit: Some early efforts with Pinephone Pro seem to be going well: https://twitter.com/mrgtwentythree/status/1469515606613393410 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SaturnFive · 2022-01-07 01:14 You could do something like a cyberdeck 🤖 [http://reddit.com/r/cyberdeck](http://reddit.com/r/cyberdeck) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sandiego427 · 2022-01-07 05:01 Thank you for bringing the facts. I always appreciate seeing the correct reference to Mach as the base. Vanquish the misnomer! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kraileth · 2022-01-07 05:52 Just the other day I thought about getting a Pine Phone Pro when they become available to the general public. And I'd be lying if I claimed to not have the thought "I wish you could run \*BSD on it!" for a second. I own a Pinebook that I got to specifically play with \*BSD and things worked reasonably well pretty quickly. The community is deliberately open to the BSDs. While it could of course could use a few more BSD members, that's *our* problem and we cannot really ask for more. But thank you very much for pointing towards some work that's done on NetBSD! This is awesome news. I don't care if most of the functionality (even the core stuff) goes away when you decide to run NetBSD on it. Having the option to do so at all is already a great thing. And people can slowly expand on that if they like. I don't expect too much to happen in this space but it would be incredibly nice if it were after all. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PunishedRaion · 2022-01-07 06:25 Even if we set aside that considering Mach and XNU are a bit different (The latter has a 4.4BSD-derived compat layer for kernel network and such) I think it's ridiculous to equate the two OSes for a variety of reasons. macOS uses mach-o, mach messaging/ipc, and many proprietary features more in common with crappy gen 1 ukernels than either a unix-like monolithic kernel or a much more sophisticated L4 kernel. macOS makes use of a proprietary PDF-like graphics engine and not something like X or NeWS. The Quartz shit is neither. Even if you install XQuartz, it's a bitch to get X applications to compile correctly due to the nonstandard filesystem hierarchy. macOS makes use flat-pak ish app containers, which are inherently wasteful and claim better security and compatibility... but can't live up to those claims. macOS cares more about aesthetics, "ease of use", pretty colors and effects than functionality or configurability. I say this using a trashpicked macbook pro while I save up for a framework laptop (I got the computer out of a dumpster after my zenbook battery started to balloon suddenly like the hindenberg). The reason people in the BSD realm like macOS is envy, and the reason mac users like BSD is because they can piggyback off it and pretend to be like it enough to be included in the discussion, I don't fall for any of it. I like the Apple Silicon, but everything else Apple does is antithetical to my morals, views and more. And as a POWER user, I really hate that "POWER" and "PowerPC" are equated with mac products and people will honestly, 15 freaking years later, suggest a Powermac G5 over a Talos II because they're too broke to spend money on their freedom or buy a cheap POWER8 on eBay (Under a grand!). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2022-01-07 08:32 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- _xsgb · 2022-01-07 10:34 There's some work for porting OpenBSD on the pinephne, you can check in openbsd-arm mailing list. Currently only serial connection AFAIK. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TrenItaglia · 2022-01-07 12:41 there are also intel rpi compatibles, unless you need power efficiency, or you can take an intel compute stick motherboard, or a single board computer with cpu of your choice, the good ones are aroubd 200$ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2022-01-07 12:53 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- IanArcad · 2022-01-07 13:47 I'm upgrading from my Pixel 1 today and by the weekend it'll be on craigslist for $10 even though it's not even five years old. Unfortunately smartphones are engineered to be disposable - kind of sad really. Pixels will run a few versions of Linux but no BSD AFAIK. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- VENTDEV · 2022-01-07 19:17 I'm going to wait for 2-3 runs of the pro and the keyboard before jumping in. Sadly, I need to use it as a phone, so I won't be running NetBSD on it full time. Self controlled Linux is still much better than the other options out there though. Luckily, switching OSs on the SD card is pretty easy. So I am certainly going to poke around NetBSD on the device. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- johnnychron · 2022-01-10 17:15 Best PowerPC product was the xbox 360. That tri-core processor was the shit. It would have made a good mac. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- h9armando · 2022-01-13 13:32 Ubuntu touch (linux) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- thedaemon · 2022-01-19 01:12 https://potabi.com/ Mobile version is planned. FreeBSD based. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mbele3000 · 2022-11-06 10:23 Why are you posting that links?