FreeBSD on the Samsung Google Nexus 10 P8110 ?

ziomario

ziomario

Hello.

A lot of years ago I've bought the tablet Samsung Google Nexus 10 P8110 that I have used only for a small amount of time. Now it is getting dust inside the drawer. I see that Linux PostMarket OS (based on the Alpine distro) works decently on this device. But I'm more interested to know if FreeBSD will work also decently. The most important specs of it are the following ones :


ChipsetExynos 5250 Dual
CPUDual-core 1.7 GHz Cortex-A15
GPUMali-T604 MP4


Could I be able to install FreeBSD on this hardware,without having a lot of experience and competence in the programming but only a low/medium experience in the system administration ? thanks.
 
The first thing I ask myself when attempting to run FreeBSD on unsupported Arm device is;
Does it have an exposed UART?
 
The Wiki claims Exynos5 is supported.
www.freebsd.org

FreeBSD/ARM Project

FreeBSD is an operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms.
www.freebsd.org www.freebsd.org

But on a Arm tablet the LCD would not be supported without drivers and settings.
So you would need serial UART to get it going.
Thusly a tablet is not a good choice to get a thinly supported Arm device working.

Personally my next step would be to see if a u-boot defconfig exists for it. If not poke at coreboot to see what exists.
With no UART you are not getting far. It is essential. Only other option is build an image.
Does it have removable storage?
 
With encrypted bootloaders on Arm64 now I think the hacking days are over. It is now a disposable device.
Buy another is what they want.
So buy a knockoff that is not encumbered.

Much like the ChromeBox you can never rid it of the proprietary stuff. You just make a layer on top.
 
ziomario said:
why with Linux is easier and with FreeBSD more difficult ?
Click to expand...
The industry has spent millions of hours of manpower making something called Android (which is what PostmarketOS is). If Linux could "just run" on these devices, why would they have done this?

And why would the FreeBSD project with fewer developers, commercial backing and no interest in consumer tablets stand a better chance where standard Linux failed?

Calling Android "Linux" is like calling a CPU "a bit of sand".
 
ziomario said:
They say that PostMarketOS is a Linux distro called Alpine. Its not Android.
Click to expand...
It looks like they are mostly just running Alpine in a chroot.

The project intends to support the mainline Linux kernel on all phones in the future, instead of the often outdated Android-specific fork, to reduce the potential for security exploits
Click to expand...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostmarketOS

In most cases, the drivers are already provided by the Android/LineageOS kernels, that we currently use and only need to be configured in the userspace (for example with udev rules).


The long time goal is using the mainline kernel.
Click to expand...

https://postmarketos.org/blog/2017/05/26/intro/
 
No some of the initial ports of the PostMarketOS use a kernel nearly identical to the android kernel. Other than that, postmarketos is different than android in literally every way possible. Saying that alpine is based on android is like saying that arch linux is based on android since they use a similar kernel. Something that might be tripping you up is that alpine and android packages have the same apk name, while they are very different in reality.
Click to expand...
 
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