While the abovementioned Snapdragon 800 ( msm8974) is surprisingly well supported by the Linux community, with mainline kernel support and several boards already in the Linus tree, only few phones, like the Sony Xperia Z1 and the Nexus 5, have a dedicated motherboard Device Tree ("hardware descriptor") file in the Linux kernel. Given the love the Linux community has expressed for some of the mobile processors used at the time, our first question is: could a phone of this age be used as a pure, true-Linux phone for modern standards? Nexus 5 running Ubuntu Touch – YouTube Ironically, the AllWinner A64 chip (bulk-priced at $5 in 2015) used in the PinePhone and several other Linux-aimed portable devices is approximately as powerful as the Snapdragon 800 used in the 2013 Nexus 5 and other flagship phones at the time, now sleeping peacefully in many of our drawers. However, specifications increased very quickly in the subsequent years (2011-2013), bringing to much faster portable devices even for modern standards. One of the main objectives of Linux is to give new life to older devices, and many projects are proving this by running (somewhat) modern UIs even on ancient smartphones like the Nokia N900.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |