a member of my hackerspace asked last night if I know if anyone has committed any code for getting Rowboat (Android) running on the BBB. Anyone know?
He said he thinks they use 3.2 so we were wondering if they are going to 3.8 or if 3.2 boardfile will just be modified to accomodate BBB. (I’m not a kernel hacker so hopefully I’m making some sense)… thanks!
it should be possible to run the BBW code with minor changes on the BBB too, just that somebody has to sit down and do it.
Well, an Android kernel is a Linux kernel with only about 24k of additional binary built in (binder IPC, anonymous shared memory, out-of-memory, etc.). That means that you can potentially take the BB Rowboat image, build the additional features into a BBB kernel, and then use that and the proper version of u-boot along with the filesystem of the BB image. That assumes that the underlying device handling mechanism (structure of /dev filetree) has not changed out from under the image, but I doubt that would be the case.
As an experiment, I tried this. It actually came close to starting up. The kernel (a 3.8.13 I built with the Android staging drivers and a few USB patches in it) bootstrapped and then died on accessing init.rc, which I believe is the initrd that contains the Android loading splash screen. The init.rc that the kernel was looking for had an odd, BBB-specific name that I don’t remember at the moment. It may be something as simple as the name of the init.rc image being incorrect. Still, it is pretty close. A little more tweaking might do it.
Not sure where it was missed that it is indeed already done using a modified 3.2 kernel.