SDIO junkware and SoC pig in a poke Broadconned
 

Just a heads up for those (3 or 4 at most) of you, who
like myself perhaps,
entertain the idea from time to time of
doing something like converting some Win 8 thingy
into a replacement for your n900.

Ain't gonna happen without a miracle,
because these things cause a lot of heartbreak
and will guzzle your time and effort:

SDIO - holier-than-thou-canst imagine throughput
BROADCOM - where did it go and what did I say to make it pout?
SoC - Ship-on-Chit: pureed somebody else's junk,
spooled up nicely on what was once a valuable piece of substrate

BayTrail - Intel descended into uncharted depths with this one.
They scraped the septic tanks of some prison for BayTrail.


I already hosed some money for Nexus 7 and
a few other Android junkware to try that route
and I quickly discovered why Canonical almost gave up
on slipping Ubuntu Touch into an Android hardware port.
Android hardware is unblemished 100% pure rubbish.
Junk, floor-scappings hot-glued into looking pretty.
Trying to run anything on Android hardware is hopeless,
unless it is a f@rtapp or a simple SMS app
geared at the tanda "gee look - I have elbows !?!" crowd.


I have been (along with some other much more intelligent folk)\
trying to hack linux onto Intel's Bay Trail SoC

I do not and never will ever again refer to Soc
as being any kind of
System on a Chip
That is the most inaccurate label anyone could ever dream up.

What SoC means
(and this also refers to virtually the entire android universe,
as far as I can tell)
is that somebody thought they could fashion a device
saving money with short bus runs that are internal to the device
and inaccessible from the outside.

What it means is that, like with most Android
(and very inclusive of the way n900 architecture was designed)
any substantial system modification needs to be performed
in an environmental simulator.
The resulting kernel/filesystem/etc
must be loaded (ala bootloader) on a kind of game-of-chance
hope/daydream/maybe-we-get-lucky-this-time effort
to concoct a working system.

It all goes together like those old sailing ships you see
constructed so nicely inside of glass bottles.

Bv115h!t!

You have Broadcoms "Wifi and Bluetooth - pick one"
chips that even the makers gave up on the STA firmware
to make it work. It even fails on Win 8 (wifi or Bt - choose 1 ! )
Talking through a stuttering SD interface that makes USB
look like heaven.

And all this is clamped into a Bay Trail walled garden
that does not even have all the power pins wired correctly.
I kid you not. They forgot to wire it correctly and
then suckered the marketplace before fixing the faults. :eek:

SoC is someone's idea of what a computer should be
and unlike those of us who have actually spent years
throwing together motherboards and choosing the best
available hardware and coaxing new firmwares into place,
the people who are throwing these SoC's together
have not one fr@kking clue about how to leave a system
with the latitude to be revised by firmware/software.

It is so utterly embarrassing to see what INTEL is doing
to the basic linux kernel with all their patches, quirks,
and other buggery to make their flaws even turn on
that it makes me wonder how the kernel guys manage
to look themselves in the mirror each morning. :confused:

I have almost always bought Intel hardware as default
(I am not risk averse to trying the competitors,
but they were always way off the open-source radar).
When they launched the z500 I got burnt badly by
the Poulsbo/powerVr debacle and I was careful for a very long time
Until Bay Trail launched and this time they have really screwed up.

Anyways,
look for a Celeron or i3/i5 if you insist on the masochist highway.
Just so somebody else knows. (or try an AMD ?) :mad:

I will not clutter this post with a bunch of links,
simply google (DuckDuck) Adam Williamson
and some of the other guys
trying to slap Fedora/Ubuntu/Arch or whatever onto
BayTrail
They try to keep a positive attitude but the reality shows through.

Re: SDIO junkware and SoC pig in a poke Broadconned
 

haha cannot leave this thread barren after my nightmares with powervr and damm broadcom all i did was me got a ubuntu cert netbook in hope for class 1 linux compatiblity only to find myself at cloud 9 when i clicked the update butt :(
Thease days i cherry pick :D

Re: SDIO junkware and SoC pig in a poke Broadconned
 

Did any of the intel's SoC's in tablets got fully adapted? (yeah, will do googling as it seems very interesting and worrying, thought someone might know right away if any of the full win8 tablets is now happily running linux, x86 turns out to be a traitor rather than savior):

Re: SDIO junkware and SoC pig in a poke Broadconned
 

I must say that trying to load linux on hopeless hardware
has been very educational.
Ubuntu 32bit 64bit
Sabayon 32bit 64bit
SolydX (XFCE 64bit)
.
But that said,
it is a very expensive way to learn
.
We keep on trying though,
quitting just before finding the wall shatter would be embarrasing.

Re: SDIO junkware and SoC pig in a poke Broadconned
 

Thanks for any sightings out there of a working system,
aside from Fedlet (which I tried on my Iconia W4-821)
there is nothing I can see so far.
I asked some of the vendors on Alibaba and they said
absolutely no way would they even try to put Ubuntu
on Bay Trail tablet.
(They will for n2600 i3/i5 and other stuff - but not Bay Trail)
x
To be pedantic about it,
I think most of the problem may have been the 32bit EFI
because just as Bay Trail comes out the tide is turning
against 32bit EFI implementations in linux.
Rod at http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/index.html
provides refind which I used to bootstrap everything
but what the system really needs is a true 32bit bootable
that can be directly loaded from the EFI partition.
I tried recompiling the kernel from 3.14 through to 3.17.2
and absolutely no sign of life for the sd bus out there.
I did manage to get a 64bit loader to boot,
but the screen was hosed - the i915 driver is not 64bit perfect.
(in my machine, maybe somebody else will get lucky, though)
x
There are some truly pathetic stories about Bay Trail out there,
and it makes for some good laughs when you read about
the contortions people have been put through by all this junk.
x
Cheers, anyway

Re: SDIO junkware and SoC pig in a poke Broadconned
 

Yep expensive way but was educational as i learnt a lot :)

Re: SDIO junkware and SoC pig in a poke Broadconned
 

When I was first trying to enter the world of Linux in 1998-1999, pretty much every hardware I tried was hopeless. So I gave up and continued using Windows like everyone else. I tried again in 2007 and found the situation about 50:50. That was when I made the switch. In 2009, I found that on most hardware I tried, most Linuxes worked right out of the box. It was Windows that didn't and needed hunting for drivers.

Why am I saying this? Times they are a-changing, the definition of "hopeless" keeps shifting all the time.

x128 bit ;)

Re: SDIO junkware and SoC pig in a poke Broadconned
 

Any idea how jolla tablet's SoC compares to bay trail?

Re: SDIO junkware and SoC pig in a poke Broadconned
 

Now,
thanks to endsormeans,
regarding the Acer Iconia w4-821 32gb
over two years later,
and the wifi solution has been around for awhile.
I finally got around to hosing Windows off the Acer
and replaced it with the Mepis version of antiX called MX-16.

I thought it would be simple
when I discovered I could get MX-16 to run the wifi.

but,

as usual,

I was not even in the same ballpark.


Using the outstanding Solydx version of USB Creator
to installing MX-16 to a USB.
MX-16 booted gloriously on the ACER w4-821 (32gb)

I found that I could make persistent MX-16 on a USB,
and doing the kernel tricks to get wifi working was great.

Woot - just click install and away we go.



Not. :mad:



MX-16 would not boot for any amount of love or money.
The EFI (ESP partition marked boot+esp) just
stared blankly back with a grub prompt.
The MX-16 version seemed to not want to mount the root partition
or whatever,
and I simply had no time to go find out what went wrong.

Anyway,
I went back to my multi-usb and

booted SolydX and then installed SolydX (64bit)
I then rebooted and ran update-grub inside of SolydX.
That discovered the MX-16 install and added it to the SolydX grub.
And when I rebooted I discovered the SolydX grub
had added the boot commands I had used for MX-16
(nomodeset) and when I booted MX-16
I had working wifi right away because MX-16,
when it installed itself, had copied everything I did on the USB.
Amazing cool that MX16 is.
I will eventually let them know about this particular episode.

So what do I have now ?

The Acer has two working linux versions (SolydX no wifi)
and MX-16, with working wifi.

All 64bit

Bluetooth is next obstacle
but from all the grief the windows gangs had,
I expect it will be a non-starter.
It appears to use the same wifi chip,
which is why there are so many issues trying to use both
wifi and bluetooth at the same time.

Sound is another non-starter
but I suspect the answer exists and can be found.

The bottom line is I now have a tablet I can email from
using a legitimately functional email client
(Ubuntu can just go play in the drainage with all their cr@p)

Yes, XFCE is a bit harsh experience for touch,
but times will change - that is a technical challenge
as opposed to a closed source challenge.
xvkbd works in lightdm greeter as well as inside the XFCE4,

Battery life seems to be still robust after sitting on a shelf
for the past two years waiting for linux evolution.

The one outstanding detail about all this is the Win 8 the tablet
originally had always crashed horribly.
With linux this has not happened, maybe just lucky so far.
I will eventually find out.


Do not go looking for this thing as if you would be able to
simply do all this - Intels enTrails are exasperating beyond hope.

I am not tempted to go through all this with a Cherry Trail,
but I expect there exist people who (hopefully)
may actually have better luck.

Two years is an awful long time to wait
to be able to use something you pay real money for.