[talk] A FreeBSD phone lives

[George Rosamond]

On 7/16/20 5:06 PM, George Neville-Neil wrote:
> Note that it "works" because it's the same as something we already run
> on, but it doesn't actually work as a FreeBSD phone.  A few of us have
> reached out to the tweeter to encourage and see where they're going with
> this.

Right, I think it's relatively simple to run a BSD that has an arm64
port on the PinePhone.

https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

But yes, as GNN said, modem support is another story, and those are
mostly proprietary binaries AFAIK.

OTOH, what's wrong with a device with a phone footprint that can run a
BSD in your pocket, just using wireless, assuming that chipset is
supported?  A good option for $150, especially compared to the GPD or
something.

But oddly, the dmesgd lists the awg driver but no man page?

awg0: <Allwinner Gigabit Ethernet> mem 0x1c30000-0x1c3ffff irq 43 on
simplebus0
awg0: cannot allocate resources for device

The other issue is ACPI/power management/hibernation. I know the dev
versions of the default Linux on the PinePhone have pretty crappy
battery life, but even the stable version isn't too grand IIRC.

Regardless, I really give huge props to the Pine64 people. They deserve
support, and we'll all be better off if *BSD devs can put time into
their devices.

g