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Bringing SerenityOS to real hardware, one driver at a time

(sdomi.pl)
309 points LorenDB | 4 comments | 08 Jan 25 16:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.002s | source
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Santosh83 ◴[08 Jan 25 18:46 UTC] No.42637177[source]▶
Read somewhere that it is relatively easy to adapt NetBSD's drivers into a custom kernel... maybe Serenity folks can go that way? Device drivers are huge obstacle for any fledgling OS.
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mysterydip ◴[08 Jan 25 19:18 UTC] No.42637487[source]▶
> Device drivers are a huge obstacle for any fledgling OS.

I've wondered if new/hobby OSes would fare better by starting out targeting a popular single board computer like a raspberry pi? A mostly fixed set of hardware to make/get drivers for and test your system on.

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yjftsjthsd-h ◴[08 Jan 25 19:23 UTC] No.42637523[source]▶
I've also argued in favor of that; I don't actually like Pis personally, but they're a super common, cheap enough, easy to acquire system and that's huge.
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FuriouslyAdrift ◴[08 Jan 25 20:15 UTC] No.42637995[source]▶
Raspberry Pi's are highly proprietary for hardware blobs...
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1. tssva ◴[08 Jan 25 20:30 UTC] No.42638150{3}[source]▶
And yet there is a wide variety of operating systems available for the RPi, so it doesn't seem to be too much of a hurdle in practice.
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2. ori_b ◴[09 Jan 25 06:12 UTC] No.42642140[source]▶
As a maintainer of one of these OSes that runs on the pi (though not the person that did the port): no, it's a pretty big issue.
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3. tssva ◴[09 Jan 25 12:36 UTC] No.42644668[source]▶
What issues did the proprietary blobs cause versus porting to other arm based SBCs without them?
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4. ori_b ◴[09 Jan 25 17:54 UTC] No.42648100{3}[source]▶
It's not so much the proprietary blobs, as the complete lack of documentation and debuggability for the peripherals. The PC platform, and several other SBCs, are either well documented, or at least give you the possibility of obtaining hardware with documentation.

That, combined with general flakiness (eg, power delivery issues for peripherals on older pis), and you end up with users blaming the software for hardware issues.

It's just not very fun to develop an OS for.