Raspberry Pi Forums

Theoretically, what would prevent an OS like symbian from booting on a raspberry pi, apart from hardware differences?

Would it even get to a stage where it would boot to some error and halt?

What if the boot loader was modified?

I understand the Pi is a lot more like a desktop with HDMI and USB. What if you were to take a Nokia LCD screen and hook it up to SPI?

Would any of the initial code sequences even run?

bozza wrote:Theoretically, what would prevent an OS like symbian from booting on a raspberry pi, apart from hardware differences?

Im my opinion: none

But the list of hardware differences that WILL stop it from booting is pretty long.
- Wrong CPU
- Wrong storage technology
- Wrong bootloader
- Wrong drivers..
- etc.. etc..

But are you talking about an existing Symbian OS image or about a theoretical version compiled from source but with the correct compiler environment for Raspberry PI ?

But are you talking about an existing Symbian OS image or about a theoretical version compiled from source but with the correct compiler environment for Raspberry PI ?

Let's say a compiled version from source. (With maybe modified bootloader code?).

That would be possible. The last of the Symbian phones actually used a very similar chip to the 2835 (no ARM), and therefor used the VC4 GPU for its graphics, camera, codecs etc. Symbian also ran on ARM, although I think its was a Nokia designed ARM core.

jamesh wrote:That would be possible. The last of the Symbian phones actually used a very similar chip to the 2835 (no ARM), and therefor used the VC4 GPU for its graphics, camera, codecs etc. Symbian also ran on ARM, although I think its was a Nokia designed ARM core.

You need to be careful in what was Symbian and what was S60. S60 was Nokia's UI, vs Symbian being the underlying OS.
And none of Symbian was running on VideoCore, just the graphics acceleration via defined APIs and VCHI - it probably doesn't help here.

Symbian was meant to be open sourced, but certainly at one point it was so constrained to being compiled on one specific, non-free, compiler version that having the source code was still pretty much useless. I don't know if that was ever resolved before Elop did his magic.

Symbian was just running on an ARM processor - I can't remember if v6 or v7. Compiling it and getting it running would be possible, but may be a very large amount of work. Taking an existing image almost certainly won't fly.

6by9 wrote:

jamesh wrote:That would be possible. The last of the Symbian phones actually used a very similar chip to the 2835 (no ARM), and therefor used the VC4 GPU for its graphics, camera, codecs etc. Symbian also ran on ARM, although I think its was a Nokia designed ARM core.

You need to be careful in what was Symbian and what was S60. S60 was Nokia's UI, vs Symbian being the underlying OS.
And none of Symbian was running on VideoCore, just the graphics acceleration via defined APIs and VCHI - it probably doesn't help here.

Symbian was meant to be open sourced, but certainly at one point it was so constrained to being compiled on one specific, non-free, compiler version that having the source code was still pretty much useless. I don't know if that was ever resolved before Elop did his magic.

Symbian was just running on an ARM processor - I can't remember if v6 or v7. Compiling it and getting it running would be possible, but may be a very large amount of work. Taking an existing image almost certainly won't fly.

I'd forgotten about the specific compiler! Metaware or similar? Cannot remember.

jamesh wrote:I'd forgotten about the specific compiler! Metaware or similar? Cannot remember.

No, it was a specific version of compiler for all the ARM code. I can't remember the details now, but I do recall having to jump through hoops to get the right toolchains set up - gcc wouldn't cut it.

In theory almost any OS could be run on a Pi if one were prepared to put enough effort in and were willing to jump the hurdles which appeared along they way.

If one is not intimately familiar with the Pi and what one is trying to make run I would not expect it to be an easy task. It would probably require considerable effort, commitment, and having good motivation for doing it.

Whether the end result would be usable or have any usefulness, whether the effort put in to get there would be worth it, would be the real questions.