Tinycore touch screen/ use on a smart phone

[blazorthon]

Before I start I just want to say thanks to everyone who helped with my problems a few weeks ago.

Alright like the subject states I was wondering if Tinycore has any touch screen extensions and other software to be used as the OS for a smart phone. I'm willing to bet that this has been thought of before but I couldn't find anything on touch screen support after a long and boring Google search.

I thought that a few modifications would make Tinycore an excellent OS for smart phones. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

[gerald_clark]

Smartphones don't run 486 processors.

[curaga]

Assuming Intel actually makes a x86 smartphone anytime soon We do have normal Xorg support for touch screens, and many of them can emulate a normal mouse.

[blazorthon]

I can imagine it would be very difficult to create a driver for those mobile processors... Might be slightly easier if I knew any current programming languages though

[blazorthon]

Actually I think AMD is trying to make some small CPUs for mobile devices like tablets at least. Intel might as well.

[gerald_clark]

X86 devices use too much power.

[blazorthon]

Is it possible to build an ARM processor that can run x86 code? Even with a speed penalty, just to have the feature would solve many problems if an ARM could emulate x86.

I have been looking up just-in-time compilers and supposedly they are capable of doing this but any speed penalty on today's ARM processors would hurt considering most of them are already pretty slow compared to power-starving x86 processors.

[Rich]

Hi blazorthon

Is it possible to build an ARM processor that can run x86 code?

It doesn't work that way. An ARM processor has one type of instruction set and an X86 has another.

For what you are talking about you would need to recompile the kernel plus drivers and applications
to run on the ARM. Recompiling for ARM has come up several times on the forum and is no simple task.
To the best of my knowledge, no one here has reported success.

[blazorthon]

I realize they are two different architectures that use different instruction sets. I don't mean natively run the code but maybe a workaround with a big speed penalty. just making it possible would be enough even with the speed problems because ARM processors are getting faster at a greater pace than x86 and may catch up in speed over the next few years.

like you said the porting of a program would be better but if this works it could help in the short term. ARM may take over x86 as the primary CPU architecture within the next decade or two

[Rich]

Hi blazorthon
And with increased speed comes increased power. When you increases the clock frequency to a CPU
or any logic circuit it will consume more current due to switching losses.

Sounds like you are looking for an X86 emulator that runs on the ARM architecture. Besides the speed
penalty you would also incur the storage space penalty for the emulation software itself.

[blazorthon]

An ARM running at similar speeds and threads to an x86 uses less power than the x86. That an ARM @ 4GHz use more power than one @ 1GHz isn't as important as that the ARM @4GHz may use less power than an x86 @ 2GHz. I admit to be just throwing numbers here but ARM is significantly more power-friendly than x86.

I know that ALL software takes up storage space as does virtually everything on the computer.

I would like to be able to run an x86 program on an ARM chip. From what little I've read a just-in-time program may do the trick.

[curaga]

You can do that, but it's slow as damn on an already slow as damn cpu. Qemu.

Existing example - darwine. Qemu + wine on a PPC mac could run x86 windows apps.


Anyway, as mentioned before, the problem with ARM is huge fragmentation. There still isn't a single bootloader or a single kernel that can boot on all ARM, there isn't a single graphics standard or an open-source gfx driver, and even the cpus vary enough to cause huge performance penalties via targeting. If you want to run on more cpus, you'll be over 50% slower on the latest ARMs (meaningless number, just as an example of the magnitude we're talking about).

[gerald_clark]

Just run the ARM linux that is alrady available for your device, if there is one.

[blazorthon]

You can do that, but it's slow as damn on an already slow as damn cpu. Qemu.

Existing example - darwine. Qemu + wine on a PPC mac could run x86 windows apps.


Anyway, as mentioned before, the problem with ARM is huge fragmentation. There still isn't a single bootloader or a single kernel that can boot on all ARM, there isn't a single graphics standard or an open-source gfx driver, and even the cpus vary enough to cause huge performance penalties via targeting. If you want to run on more cpus, you'll be over 50% slower on the latest ARMs (meaningless number, just as an example of the magnitude we're talking about).

I'm not worried about how slow it is nearly as much as it just working. Does tinycore take advantage of multiple cores?

[bmarkus]

I'm not worried about how slow it is nearly as much as it just working. Does tinycore take advantage of multiple cores?

Yes.

BTW, it has nothing to do with TC, it is up to the Kernel.