Solved FreeBSD ... android, iOS

Hello Guys,

my apologize for the following question.

Could it be possible to boot, in some way, a cellular phone (last generation working with android or iOS) with FreeBSD ? :eek::eek::eek::'‑(:'‑(

Bye bye !!!
 
Not really. In the same way it isn't really possible to boot a desktop or server with Android or iOS.

With a lot of driver development and special development hardware it would be possible to implement the support but from the consumer units that are available to the public, it isn't very likely.

Perhaps use an emulator like Limbo or Bochs on Android to run FreeBSD. It is quite slow but generally works.
 
The "SoC" (System on a chip) in a Raspberry Pi is very similar to the chips that power low-end cell phones. It takes many weeks or months of development to get a new operating system to boot on one of those chips. Look at how long it took FreeBSD to boot on the RPi, and it still doesn't support 100% of the RPi hardware. And that was on a SoC that the manufacturer intends to be used in embedded systems, so they release full documentation for it.

If a real expert put the required time into it, and was able to get full documentation for the cell phone, they would probably be able to get FreeBSD to boot on it. The first requirement is theoretically even feasible. The second requirement is outright impossible for Apple cellphones (Apple will obviously not release documentation at the level of the SoC, since they manufacture it themselves), and I don't know what the situation for the better Android phones is (whether they use documented chips or not).

What are you trying to accomplish? If you want to run your own code on a cellphone, that's quite easy: Just write it for Android. The Android SDK is easy to download. Since Android is Unix-based, the basic code will be very similar to FreeBSD. For example, last fall I used a tiny little demo application written in Kivy (a graphical toolkit built around Python) on a Mac and on an Android device. Works.

Or if you are trying to use the cell phone network from a self-built device? You can buy cell phone "radios" with antennas that connect to systems like the Raspberry Pi. For example, Adafruit sells the "FONA", which is fundamentally a GSM radio modem that connects via serial port to a computer like a RPi.
 
Im really not sure what is the end goal for dd'ing memory from cellphone, but jailbroken ios and rooted android have full root access to a unix ish terminal, either through ssh or through adb shell.
 
jailbroken ios and rooted android have full root access to a unix ish terminal, either through ssh or through adb shell.

Hello !
please, can you be more clear ?

It's very dangerous enter a cellphone as root ... however, having full root access to a unix ish terminal ... can I dd any internal data (take an image) on an external memory device (an hard disk) ?

Note: i've not solid cellphone'es knowledges, so, please, speack basics :).

Thanks very much.
 
root your phone -> install android sdk -> run adb shell on your pc while device connected -> have busybox with lots o stuff -> run su on your phone

or

root your phone -> install ssh server from a valid source like f-droid -> connect to your phone through ssh -> same thing.

Much better place to discuss that in-depth would be xda-developers, they have forum subsections for most android phones in existence.

Filesystem layout is a bit unorthodox, but its understandable if you put your time into reading up or exploring it.

You can't connect external harddrive (sata) to your phone obviously, you're limited to OTG connected usb devices (but they would need external power source, probably) or to external SD card.


please take it with grain of salt and caution and understand what you are doing.

Bricked phones is not fun to deal with. At all. Don't do stuff unless you're sure you really need to do exact thing you're doing or unless you're sure you can revert your action.


Also, again, why do you want to have an image of your phones internal memory? Probably there are much easier ways to achieve what you want to achieve, be it a virtual machine with android or a backup image.
 
or a backup image
Surely ... really the aim is to do a backup image, but under a strong restriction: all the technical operations executed to backup the cellphone must not change its memory status in any way at the backup time. That is the backup must to be a freeze copy of the state of the cellphone. For this way I generally speack of image file.

However, I've an Android cellphone where I can take a test.
Please, when you have some time, can you write here how to backup it on a usb stick ?

In this case the aim is to use FreeBSD to analyze its data.

To me surely, but also for someone in the FreeBSD Forums, this could probably enjoy.

Thanks in advance for your time.

Bye bye !!!:):):):)
 
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