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> If you have a smartphone and don't have a raspberry pi or other SBC and have some use for an under powered Linux box then have fun. The situation I imagine f

> If you have a smartphone and don't have a raspberry pi or other SBC and have some use for an under powered Linux box then have fun. The situation I imagine for this is that a big solar flare comes and takes down the internet for the foreseeable future. There's all kinds of things that are going to stop working because they want to phone home, but cant. Many of them will just be trash at that point, but some can be hacked to respect some other server on the local LAN--that server might be a repurposed phone. These might be important things. Farm equipment, thermostats, vehicles... The more control we can have over hardware that'll be easy to find, the better.

rezonant 2y ago
If it's about repurposing phones, then just root the phone. On Android, that's generally not restricted. The benefit of not rooting is that device attestation (used in banking apps and other sensitive things) still works. If you don't care about attestation, root away.
rowinofwin 2y ago
It is also good to remember that everything started off inefficient with virtualization, it was incredibly slow and broke lots of things, but now it runs the modern web. I can run a VM on consumer grade hardware and reach most of the way to performance parity with native hardware with no technical skill past installing a few packages and running a wizard. Given the number if ARM based systems on the market now with built in battery and wireless I can imagine a lot of people wanting to repurposed then into home servers with power redundancy and remote access. The future looks bright for ARM servers
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  with pcs you had so little variation compared to smartphones. some 5 cpus. ram was dumb. disk had a very predictable api but was the worst. serial etc was just dumb pipes and interrupts. then there was some dozen video and network cards. those two took longer to get drivers. with smartphones you have, i can't even ballpark a number... half chips are SoC in disguise which hardware changes every week then on top of that there's a custom firmware backed for each customer. multiply that for each little piece of the device. there's a reason Android alternatives are stuck on last released kernel version: they just copy paste the binary drivers
pjmlp 2y ago
We are going to nuke ourselves before that.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  It could start next month for all we know.

rezonant 2y ago

If it's about repurposing phones, then just root the phone. On Android, that's generally not restricted. The benefit of not rooting is that device attestation (used in banking apps and other sensitive things) still works. If you don't care about attestation, root away.

rowinofwin 2y ago

It is also good to remember that everything started off inefficient with virtualization, it was incredibly slow and broke lots of things, but now it runs the modern web. I can run a VM on consumer grade hardware and reach most of the way to performance parity with native hardware with no technical skill past installing a few packages and running a wizard. Given the number if ARM based systems on the market now with built in battery and wireless I can imagine a lot of people wanting to repurposed then into home servers with power redundancy and remote access. The future looks bright for ARM servers

1oooqooq 2y ago
with pcs you had so little variation compared to smartphones. some 5 cpus. ram was dumb. disk had a very predictable api but was the worst. serial etc was just dumb pipes and interrupts. then there was some dozen video and network cards. those two took longer to get drivers. with smartphones you have, i can't even ballpark a number... half chips are SoC in disguise which hardware changes every week then on top of that there's a custom firmware backed for each customer. multiply that for each little piece of the device. there's a reason Android alternatives are stuck on last released kernel version: they just copy paste the binary drivers

pjmlp 2y ago

We are going to nuke ourselves before that.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
It could start next month for all we know.