A tablet running FreeBSD?

Phishfry said:
I am glad to stand corrected here. I thought all Baytrails were affected with a problem with i915drm. What version of the i915drm driver are you using?
Maybe I drag these back out for testing. Venue11 that I quote above has Braswell and should be unaffected.

grandpa you notice this in your examination of i915drm problems with certain Baytrail/ValleyView CPU graphics?
Click to expand...

I have a workaround for Cherryview on 14.4-RELEASE running on Braswell architecture (which is a fancy way of calling an old Asus r517sa laptop with Intel HD graphics). Cherryview is often bundled in the code together with Valleyview but I haven't specifically looked for Baytrail in the code.

The workaround is described in this thread. Basically I installed a 14.4-RELEASE and git cloned ports tree 2026Q2 to get the drm-510-kmod port, modified the Makefile to remove the restriction for >= FreeBSD 14.2 and then for the /usr/src tree I did git switch to the source for 14.3, built the drm-510-kmod, switched back the src to 14.4 and rebooted.

I am also trying to trace the root cause to as why drm-515-kmod not is working on that same Asus laptop and so far I have traced it - as SirDice pointed out to me early in the thread - to a call that goes through the linuxkpi compatibility layer in the kernel. After reading from this Forum for a while I've come to realize that SirDice always points you to the right way.

/grandpa
 
grandpa said:
Cherryview is often bundled in the code together with Valleyview
Click to expand...
There was a ValleyView 2 as well...

It seems these tablet chips were also in some of the Intel Phablets or 7" Upright Orientated Handheld Computing devices. Some even had cellular modem.
When you look at the specs of the Z3735 it is pretty respectable for a phone chip.
Handled differently the whole phone ecosystem could have looked different. Nokia was one of the only Windows Phone makers I can remember.
Some of these initiatives between Intel and Windows really worked and some didn't. Dell had a Windows Intel 7" Tablet with modem instead of wifi..

I would like to hear the story how they got BIOSmakers to discount the 32bit EFI-BIOS or why they used 32 bit UEFI for a 64 bit chip. I assume cost.
It could have been lock-in?
 
Acer Switch Alfa 12

Only way to use and to install FreeBSD is to disable safe boot from BIOS and to use Gnu Grub installed in an own partition and in EFI boot partition. During each boot F12 has to be pressed. If power has been down because battery is out and after power distribution breakages, the device boots Windows 10 automatically and resets the BIOS. It is annoying to set BIOS settings again using F5. First versions of FreeBSD did not let the lid to be closed when using the desktop monitor.

Graphics card should work. There were frequent problems using Intel Skylake drivers. WLAN driver never installed (should not work). Bluetooth never installed. Everything from the periferals, USB-C works, HDMI and RJ45 and 1000Mb/s. A good dock arrangement is necessary. Additional memory from USB-C dock is not a good idea.

Water cooling. Silent. No holes. The screen detached from the frame too easily at some three to five years of operation. It is unknown if someone can fix it. If not cracked into and software packages broken somehow, unknown problems occur frequently at the end of the "tablet" lifetime, at around eight years. Metal from the advertisements was silver color plastic, not metal even if told so (and later verified before buying). When bought, internal storage size was too small to use more than one OS.

The Windows 10 tablet mode was not practical either. The keyboard had to be used to log in and to work with it. Not a tablet, a notebook, not a laptop. Could be a tablet.

Today touch screen works by default. The touch screen is a generic fits for all device.
 
Microsoft Surface "Tablet", maybe or some other x86 tablet running Windows.
Otherwise, the Android ones will not boot anything else but custom ROM and/or you won't have drivers for anything.
Best you can do is to run Linux via Termux (no rooting needed).
 
im sure chinese android tablets can boot linux unmodified as most of the android tv media boxes can.
i even run freebsd on such a box (no graphics and wifi though)
i also have a cheap x86 tablet that is 64 bit atom and boots freebsd. but wifi is some realtek on sdio bus so no go. graphics can be probably be hacked to work. but in the end you'll get a slow and quirky device.
 
covacat said:
im sure chinese android tablets can boot linux unmodified as most of the android tv media boxes can.
i even run freebsd on such a box (no graphics and wifi though)
i also have a cheap x86 tablet that is 64 bit atom and boots freebsd. but wifi is some realtek on sdio bus so no go. graphics can be probably be hacked to work. but in the end you'll get a slow and quirky device.
Click to expand...
I would love to be able to run FreeBSD on my old mobile phones. It would be the perfect homelab servers - low consumption, small, screen attached for easy diagnostics and can run on battery or safely shut down in case of power outage. Not counting very good camera for security and capable 4G included for comms bypass.
Yeah well.
Rapsberry has ethernet and usb but is too clunky, no screen and no battery. And is much more expensive than spare old phone.
 
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