OSDev.org

So I just found out that Android was ported (or better still is) to mobile phones which originally run Windows or iOS (or other OSs).

As an example look at this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yO2KQHkt4A

My question now is, means this that I could port/write my OS to a mobile phone?

If yes, is everything I need, to just run it (and show stuff on the screen), in the Android source?
Another thing is, as far as I know there isn´t any source code for working with GSM, is there? I mean so that you could also call any other mobile phone.

First of all you'll probably need a dev-phone in order to be able to flash your SW. To some extent there may be closed source parts, but that should not be impossible to interface with. The actual implementation of the radio stack fx may be closed, but the interface to it is well defined.

Yes, no, maybe.

You sure can port your OS to a mobile phone, it being a computer of some sort.
However, practically you can do it if there are open tool set for that phone (i.e. it have a common cpu inside, that gcc can target) and the drivers to work with phone's hardware, for example from android.

If Android works on it, then yes, it's likely you would be able to castrate it down to a hello-world-on-a-screen OS, and build up from there.

About GSM - yes and no, there are GSM chips with open specs and drivers,you can even build a phone from scratch with one.
But what is in the specific phone you might use as your target can be anything. It might be quite proprietary, might be common open chip. As before, if Android calls, then there's likely a driver made (or given by the vendor).

Be advised, a phone is not a PC, one buggy flashing and you'll get a phone-shaped paperweight.

I only wanted to know if it possible to port/write an OS to a phone where Android is running or was ported to (from the community). So there has to be a way of booting another OS.

First of all you'll probably need a dev-phone in order to be able to flash your SW.

As I mean a phone where the community ported Android to, you wont need a dev-phone.

However, practically you can do it if there are open tool set for that phone (i.e. it have a common cpu inside, that gcc can target) and the drivers to work with phone's hardware, for example from android.

The most phones use an ARM CPU and as long as Android is running on it, it is supported by gcc. As you said, for the drivers one can consult the Android/Linux source.

Be advised, a phone is not a PC, one buggy flashing and you'll get a phone-shaped paperweight.

I don´t think so. E.g. on the iPhone you have some sort of bootloader (if you jailbreaked it) and I only need to copy over my OS files and create a new boot-entry (in theory it should be easy ).

So I would need to select a phone where I try to port my OS to and then I need to get the specs of the phone. For a beginning it would be enough if I could show something on the phone´s screen.

Btw, you could start with beagleboard or pandaboard

Yeah, I wanted and still want to do that, but I need the money and as a student you normally have not much of it

Does anyone know if there is an emulator for the beagle- or pandaboard? I know that there is a qemu version, but I need to compile this by myself and the last time I tried to compile qemu under windows it didn´t work so well

FlashBurn wrote:I need to compile this by myself and the last time I tried to compile qemu under windows it didn´t work so well

So compile it under not Windows.