The BlackBerry Passport secure boot has been exploited : let's talk about the chance to install FreeBSD there.

ZioMario

ZioMario

Hello to everyone.

Finally the BlackBerry Passport secure boot has been exploited,so a developer has found the way to install Android on top of it instead of QNX. Anyway the conversion is not easy,because a chip should be removed and some soldering are needed. But it is doable. There are already the first users who are running Android 11 on their old and dead BlackBerry Passport. I want to ask : if the default OS of the BlackBerry is QNX and QNX is Unix based,how many chances there are to be able to convert / remove QNX and replace it with FreeBSD ?. QNX are FreeBSD are cousins or they are so different that we should give up the idea even before we start talking about it ? Let's talk about this.
 
QNX is very different from most unixes. It is an RTOS, like FreeRTOS for example, and it uses a microkernel. So I don't think using QNX as an operating system will make it easier to port FreeBSD to a device.
 
Not only above but from a hardware perspective there is no Qualcomm Snapdragon Krait 400 support to speak of in FreeBSD.
We only have minimal commits for Snapdragon.
Some work was also done on initial support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 SoC, featuring the Krait CPU, which is considered a "platform" for use in smartphones, tablets, and smartbook devices. Krait has many similarities with the ARM Cortex-A15 CPU and is also based on the ARMv7 instruction set. A minimal console driver was written, and FreeBSD's early boot messages can be now seen on the serial console. The timer driver works too, and the boot now stops at the mountroot prompt.
Click to expand...
https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2013-10-2013-12.html <<< From 2013
 
Ok. So,I think that soon we will see Linux running there,after Android. And maybe in 10 years,FreeBSD after Linux. Now its the time to buy it because I see a lot of fun in the next future.
 
Buying anything Armv7 is pointless. Arm32 will be gone soon. Not desirable for new designs.

How do you solder UART pins on a phone? My hand is not that good.
 
I agree in general,but I don't agree if we talk about the BlackBerry. It has an aesthetic that fascinates. Maybe not everyone, but many. I am one of those. A phone is not just the operating system that runs on it. I will spend a hundred of Euro to modify it internally and to be able to run Android there. First because it is now gathering dust and I don't want to have wasted money , then because using its physical keyboard and enjoy its aesthetics almost excites me.
 
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