2.6.16.5 Kernel on E680 / E680i / A780.

[zbangash]

Harald Welte has been working on 2.6.16.5 kernel for Moto E680 / A780 phones, and has a lot of progress so far, including booting with Kernel 2.6.16.5, and SPI drivers using hardware SPI controller.

If anyone here can / wants to work with him on the project, or to find out more about it, his blog is on here:

http://gnumonks.org/~laforge/weblog/linux/a780/

[lucienium]

hey, what are the advantages of switching to a newer kernel? sorry for asking, i just don't have an idea. thanks

[yaworski]

hey, what are the advantages of switching to a newer kernel? sorry for asking, i just don't have an idea. thanks

For a normal user it has no advantages for now, because Motorola proprietary kernel drivers will not work with other kernel than original one, so the phone with newer kernel is not usable as a phone for now.

In the future maybe we will be able to switch to new kernel together with the new linux platform which will provide us open sdk to create many cool applications .

Working new self compiled kernel will give us advatage of choosing different kernel modules and possibility to apply different patches.

This is the way I see it .

[jcervera]

Hi,

as for the advantages of running a new kernel, offering an open sdk, here's what Harald says in his blog:

"[...] Once this is done, we can start developing our own "phone" programs, and get rid of all the bloated embeddedQT and Java crap that is running on the phone. It has 48MB of physical ram, and the database daemon has a resident size of 2.7MB, the address book 4.5MB, the "phone" program has 6.6MB. This is really rediculous...

At the end of the road, I'm dreaming of something small and efficient, running uClibc, busybox, DirectFB, ... "