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Author Topic: Looking into Chinese super-phones! (for testing Linux and dCore)  (Read 1420 times)

Offline LichenSymbiont

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I just want to bring attention to how quickly Android phones are evolving in China, and get some discussion going, and hopefully some testing with dCore!

For instance, you certainly wouldn't find phones with dual 8-core (MTK6592 processor, which is A7) anywhere else!
Look at this beast: Well, I had a link (no commercial links), but here is the search phrase on ebay: "MTK6592 8+8 core 6GB+32GB" without quotes.
To find it elsewhere, it would probably be a Chinese page.
8+8 cores it says, so it's difficult to search for it, and there are only a few with double octa core.
2k screen... that's also crazy!
I can't find what GPU it has though...

dCore is pretty much perfect for a mobile device, as it doesn't take up much space, and it can have most things in RAM. And it doesn't work with too many files, if you set importsce to extract the inbetween-data of deb2sce in RAM. It's just those .deb files that takes up extra space... I wish we could just mount them directly to root (which is most likely not even possible, though you could create symlinks to the files in the mounted "device"!), or load them into RAM and copy to root. Or possibly have all basic libraries and programs in one SCE, which is always loaded at boot, and so you don't even have to download and merge the basic libraries.

Well, a lot can be improved in dCore, but let's talk about rooting and booting cheap phones (or not so cheap, if you prefer).

The standard testing setup should be phone + dCore, and possibly a bluetooth keyboard with touchpad (so you can use it more as a regular computer), or 3D mouse.
But to make it easy, we should have a basic SCE with ARM packages, so you don't have to install from TTY, and can get started right away.
But at the moment we don't even have one for the regular dCore, but I'm working on it!

I just want to get some discussion going, as Chinese phones are accessible to almost anyone.
But quad or octa core, and targetting the A7 line.

So has anyone had any luck running *pure* Linux with phones at all?
Even if Canonical releases even more amazing phones with Ubuntu, I think the tinkerers of TC won't be satisfied. So we should have our own, amazing core.

Edit:
Think about what kind of phones we will see next year, when we have Chinese mobile manufacturers solving the multiple-CPU problem.
We might see phones and boards with four 12-16 core CPU's!
Then we can run a x86 virtual machine, as if it was running native, on top of it!
But it would obviously be better if we compile more Linux software for ARM, and do static or dynamic recompiling of Windows software.
I think Wine should expand into dynamic recompiling, as then we would have a center of focus for the project which is new and fresh and exciting!

So developing virtual reality games and software for Linux is the obvious way to get to mobile VR! As it's then easy to recompile to a super-phone with a 4k OLED display, or a board, with display attached.
As then you can have a whole graphics processor for shader-processing and pixel-pushing for VR, which graphics card makers would not be able to implement as smoothly.
So geometry and vertex shading on one graphics processor, which then pushes the culled, and lighted geometry to the pixel-shading and pixel-pushing GPU.
With shared RAM, for textures, as much can be done with textures, both on the geometry and vertex side and the pixel-shading side.
Well, one can dream...
But fact is: mobile VR will be entirely possible next year, or the year after. And it would definitely be best to run Linux!
« Last Edit: October 28, 2014, 07:27:10 AM by LichenSymbiont »
Basic mindfulness discipline: Why not be totally relaxed and fearless in this moment?
I have finally started my Github page for dCore: https://github.com/LichenSymbiont/linux-scripts