[Tinkerphones] Happy New Year + Report

[Paul Boddie]

On Sunday 6. January 2019 18.16.36 H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:
> 
> > Am 05.01.2019 um 19:11 schrieb Paul Boddie <paul at boddie.org.uk>:
> > 
> > Once again, I feel a bit guilty about not continuing to work on the Letux
> > 400 Linux kernel, but there are diminishing returns in doing so.
> 
> No need to worry - I am also far behind my plan to restart the Letux 400
> units and get access to the boot console... Before this is done, it is not
> even possible to test your kernel.

It isn't really a high priority. In fact, I had thought about using L4Linux 
for testing, employing my L4-based configuration to show the serial console 
output on the screen:

"L4Re: Textual Debugging Output on the Framebuffer"
https://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=2196

However, I think I would need to introduce a way of getting Linux to handle 
floating point instruction exceptions (which it normally does), sending the 
exceptions out of the Fiasco.OC kernel where they are trapped and back into 
user space, and this is somewhat beyond my level of expertise/experience at 
the moment. I think that I would just need to define the Linux "task" as the 
handler for such exceptions, but it isn't the sort of thing I've tried to do 
so far.

Doing this might also help me test Linux for the Ben NanoNote, where the 
maintainer of the Ingenic functionality cannot test the status of the existing 
code and where I also don't have serial console access. Maybe this is 
something else to find time to do this year.

[...]

> Yes, that is something I wish as well, but I am not sure it will ever
> happen. The key problem seems to me that collaboration of volunteers
> doesn't work well and scale with number of participants for hardware. So
> usually each initiative has exactly one head driving things. And success
> depends significantly on budget and experience of this project head.

It seems to be the case that the leader of each initiative usually has the 
expertise and connections to be effective whereas potential contributors 
struggle to make themselves useful.

> Let's see if this change in the future.

Let's hope so! Thanks for persevering with your own projects!

Paul