The Galaxy S II i9100 uses the Samsung Exynos SoC and a Mali 4xx GPU.


As far as I understand it, the Exynos SoC drivers have already been merged with the Linux kernel. There are also open-source drivers for Xorg for the Mali 400 GPU. I am rather noobish at Linux porting, but I really don't see a reason why a Maemo/MeeGo port would be unfeasible at this point. (Please correct me if I'm wrong!) It seems like all that we need is already available, and given enough time and effort, we can have a fully working Linux port - MeeGo, Maemo, you name it... I am currently saving money to buy a SGS II and when I do, I would certainly give this a try.

Have you tried speaking to the Mer team to see what adaptations are required to make Mer work on this device? If you can get the drivers and any other h/w adaptations specific to the SGS II to work with Mer, well we might be looking at a new direction for all of us! The only thing is they (the Mer team) seem quite aligned with the whole RMP setup, so if you want it more Debian-ish then you'd probably have to take it apart a bit.

As to porting Maemo5 itself, why? There is a lot out of date and a lot very hardware bound. It's good for what it was designed for - the N900, but very much all or nothing (both device & OS or neither).

It's not that simple. Open source drivers do exist - yes, but you still don't have sources for libEGL - i.e. the opengl es acceleration. I couldn't find binaries linked against libc yet (only bionic/android ones - not compatible), not to mention hardfp ones. Maybe there could be something in the Linaro project (for the Origen board) - but as I said, I didn't find anything.

Also I'm not quite sure that you have all the kernel modules. Just recently they started working on DRM - I'm not sure it supports the HDMI out yet etc.

Another problem could be the GSM chipset - question is whether it uses some common protocol, or whether you have to sniff and decypher it.


I was looking into LG Optimus 2x, which is quite similar in terms of power - and for that (tegra 2 chipset) nvidia provides a complete linux solution. Also the GSM module seems to be supported by oFono (on the first sight) so this could be an easier way to go...

But maybe Samsung will help eventually, when he's that much into merging that exynos stuff to kernel mainline.

Samsung's tizen stuff would have to comply with mainline so there's hope down the line for better compatibility.

Linaro has an Ubuntu build for the Origen board (which is based on Exynos 4210) that seems to work. For now, we know that audio, touchscreen and wlan can work under linux. There's no way of knowing whether the modem and GPS will work without flashing the image on a Galaxy S II. I was trying to find what modem and GPS does the GSII have, but couldn't find anything..

Samsung have released an OMAP-based version of the S2!
http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i910..._s_ii-4327.php

It uses the OMAP 4430 chipset. Given the good shape of TI's SoC on Linux, do you think this will be able to run MeeGo/Tizen with little or no modification?

Yes galaxy nexus (or one version IIRC) is omap 4430 too.
I doubt it counts for much though.... :-/