HPH RK3288 Dual-Boot ROM v1.3 by mo123

[Guest]

Hmm...tri-boot you say? Could it be that the heavens have bestowed upon us the HTML5 encryption friendly Chromium, upon OS? (Not us, get it :-P ) or could it be that we are about to taste the sweetness of NetBSD? Windows 95 in QEMU maybe? I'll bet rk3288 tears win 95 to bits. Maybe even NT 4! Even more fun, a really old NT port in MIPS, PowerPC, or Alpha!

I would like to see this on our boxes:

https://www.freaktab.com/showthread.php?23230-Run-x86-binaries-on-Ugoos-UT3-UT3S

And again, as others also requested, an overclocked kernel.
Yesterday I soft-bricked my box in my first attempt overclocking it
Maybe today I'll have better luck...

[theeze]

Not to further derail this thread, but I don't get the obsession with popcorn time. The Genesis addon for xbmc does a much better job since it has direct links and not p2p, not to mention a wider selection.

[m1pnk]

Not to further derail this thread, but I don't get the obsession with popcorn time. The Genesis addon for xbmc does a much better job since it has direct links and not p2p, not to mention a wider selection.

im not a fan but some people find it streams easier

[scooter2014]

Can also use Orono add on it streams well. Has anyone tried ubuntu 15.4 on the box yet? Hardware not there for this yet but it's looking more promising now.

[m1pnk]

are you saying windows mo ?

[m1pnk]

cool.... forgot to say es file manager....think its one of the better ones ?

just tried this.... cool... http://lifehacker.com/memory-map-sho...ium=socialflow

[sawbones999]

I would like to see this on our boxes:

https://www.freaktab.com/showthread.php?23230-Run-x86-binaries-on-Ugoos-UT3-UT3S

And again, as others also requested, an overclocked kernel.
Yesterday I soft-bricked my box in my first attempt overclocking it
Maybe today I'll have better luck...

I don't know about that exagear. I have not seen any independent testing whatsoever. I ran a quick Google search just now and apart from a few mentions in forums, the only other sites I found about it were news sites about up and coming software using benchmark data (same images even) directly off of the manufacturers website.

Could there be translation software better than QEMU, certainly, there already is. Is there any x86 to ARM translation software out there that can make deliver on the outrageous speed increases this company is claiming? I'm pretty skeptical.

I've run win 95/98 on QEMU for android before and it's usable. I haven't even tested it since like 5 years ago and then it was still usable on much slower than current android hardware. Properly compiled, optimized QEMU builds for current ARM devices are probably even better. There are faster x86 translators already.

QEMU's claim to fame is probably in the shear number of processor architectures which are supported and the accuracy with which they are supported. Not really known to be the fastest gun in west.

I think the fact that exagear only supports Ubuntu as a guest OS is kinda suspect as well. I mean if it accurately supports x86 translation of 386 or higher, then why not any other OS? BIOS legality is not really an issue because there are free/open source pc BIOSes (or is that BI-i. Yes, that's a poor attempt at pluralisation humor).

I suppose it's possible that this company has created some form of hardware/kernel assisted "user mode Linux" type translation, hence only Linux as guest, but if they did I'd be willing to bet they're violating the GPL. Because in order to do that there would be kernel code in the product, and i will not support GPL violations with money, even if i suspect it.

Also I just noticed this is only available for ARM/Linux, not android. Qemu runs on android, Linux, VMS, plan 9, and any other OS just about. Why would/should I care about running wine on ARM/Linux all that much? Call me crazy but I think I'd rather use VNC or RDP to connect to my Windows server (or desktop) from ARM Linux/android and run my apps there. I do believe that performance, while not ideal, will probably be a far better solution than translators.

2 last digs on the exagear site before I conclude this mandatory Sawbones rant of the day. 1 they never, even, once that I can find tell us what is their reference x86 hardware. For all i know it's a 486sx25 with 8mb of ram. 2 look at these apps which they are bragging about running on their site: http://eltechs.com/product/exagear-mobile/

They are all extremely old, WILL run satisfactorily on QEMU android, much less Linux, and are mostly old DOS games. Most of which already have Linux AND android native ports.



Now, I would like to add something ON TOPIC! I don't think most of us want readily available free apps which are available from the play store included in the next release. Small, useful utilities like ES file manager, sure. That's a tad bit different.

Yes, I use Facebook and messenger on my phone, but I have ZERO interest in running them on my TV. Things like that are so simple to fix yourself why bother asking a dev(who is already working his ass off trying to meet demanding clamour for perfect playback, overclock, etc. ya know, real easy quick fixes) to include it in a serious release. It's a waste of space (Mine) and time (Mine for removing it, Mo's for including it). Do you want Mo to come over and install the ROM/teach you how to use your television as well? While he's at it why not have him pick up your dry cleaning, wash your car, and loan you a hundred dollars. And how much are you paying him to do that? Hmmm? Speak up? Did you say nothing? Oh, you might donate a dollar? Really? Why that's soooooo NICE of you! How thoughtful

Seriously, though, I have no excuse for ranting on like I did in this post either. Kinda hi-jacking the thread under the guise of OS's I know won't be in the triple boot ROM. So I do apologize for that, mo. I've been in an extremely long winded technical rant type mood lately.

Cheers and looking forward to this new release. You know you could do something fun to celebrate the tri-boot, though. Something like an Amiga OS easteregg, or possibly Plan 9 for trs color computer. Something like that, which would be small and just for laughs.

Lol, you all probably think I'm a nut!

Cheers,
-SB

[Guest]

Wow. Thanks for a thorough post But most of it is for another thread. Nevertheless, very informative.
If emulating windows is not at acceptable levels, maybe it's better to purchase different tv-box with hardware capable of running dual OS (Android/WinRT) natively. They even have very affordable prices.


Regarding my overclocking attempts, I failed one more time
Either boot.img repacking is not done properly, or I don't do my modifications like the system expects.

@Mo: will your new ROM have kernel and resources outside of boot.img, just like your previous ROMs?
That way overclocking would be easier, but your overclock out-of-the-box would be even more welcomed


Eagerly waiting for your new ROM...

[sawbones999]

Wow. Thanks for a thorough post But most of it is for another thread. Nevertheless, very informative.
If emulating windows is not at acceptable levels, maybe it's better to purchase different tv-box with hardware capable of running dual OS (Android/WinRT) natively. They even have very affordable prices.

I think the best hardware for emulating Windows for the foreseeable future will overwhelmingly be x86 via hardware assisted virtualization from Linux via VMware or free version of similar.

The rant above however was about executing x86 Windows 32 binaries on ARM via translation in Linux or android. In that case dual-boot Linux or android with Windows RT faces the same pitfalls because we're still talking about x86 executed on ARM via translation. Now, possibly, WinRT might be better at running Windows x86, or not. I'm not aware of any products for this, and i think there are probably a lot of differences between winRT API and the win32 API, which WINE strives to be a drop in replacement for.

None of it is ideal. Any way you look at it we're talking about translating the operating system AND the processor architecture simultaneously. It won't be fast. You could have the fastest processor ARM has got in the pipeline for the next 10 years and it'll probably still be slow. Well, That may be a bit of an overstatement. It is probably likely that in a decade an arm proc would have no problem executing x86 code from today's Windows machine under android or Linux.

Like VAX VMS emulation on Alpha, or DOS emulation on Windows, or Amiga emulation on Windows or Linux. Often emulating an older proc and OS can be even faster than the original hardware.

Current hardware emulating yesterday's hardware and operating system is much easier usually than today's hardware and OS emulating a totally different implementation of today's hardware and OS. The only real way to do this on one machine is to actually to marry two processor implementations with separate storage and operating systems, which may have some awareness or control of each other. Apple had this before with some old Macs, press a hot key and you are in DOS running on a 486. Hot key again back into finder 7 or whatever. Sun tried this, too with a single board pc on a pci slot which had some integration with Solaris and the overlying sparc based parent system, running Windows.

The only other option I could envision would be a hybrid CPU, such as dual core, each one implementing a totally different CPU architecture. I imagine the hardware controls such as BIOS implementation and resource scheduling would be very difficult to implement and expensive. Not to mention impractical except in some theoretical special use case.

But, this really is a topic for another thread. We're so far off topic by now, I don't even know what to say. My whole point earlier was that I was very skeptical of the claims of that software, and the only reason the software was mentioned was because i was being silly to begin with.

I'm extremely sorry for all this craziness Mo! I promise to try very, very hard to keep my future contributions on topic and not go shooting off on crazy tangents. I will try to refrain from this type of craziness until you release you're first ROM which focuses on cross architecture binary translation :-D

Cheers and I really think we should focus on mo's ROM. While I enjoy wild speculation about things like this, this is an inappropriate outlet for such things.

I need sleep again. Been a long long day, funeral, time with family, etc. This had been a welcome mental diversion from all that. If anyone else still wants talk crazy about this thing, start a thread and pm me address. I'm ready to drop it.

Cheers and thanks!
-SB

[Zanatos]

Any updates?

[sawbones999]

About mo's ROM or x86 emulation on android? Lol.

Seriously, though, a couple here have pm'd me about that(including mo) and i was able to find some examples of qemu or limbo running in KVM on android. This would be much faster than running it in normal user space and allow hardware assisted virtualization with more direct CPU access than user space emulation or virtualization.

Intel is using it to run Windows 8 on android x86, and I found an example of arm Linux or android on top of android arm.

It should also be possible to use this for faster cross architecture emulation as well. Similar to following the instructions for building QEMU for kvm on Linux x86 as described in the documentation for running android ARM emulators in the android SDK.

How long before we can expect to see this in practical use? Your guess is good mine. The newer ARM cores support hardware virtualization (a15, a17, a56, etc), but I haven't looked the rk3288 kernel code to see if kvm is available.

The biggest problem is, none of the QEMU for android has been maintained or updated for a long time and is pretty out of date.

It would be awesome to see the software catch up with the hardware.
Sorry for hijacking your thread again, mo! I thought since we haven't gotten any updates from you, maybe I could get away with updating my previous hijack

On topic, we're all excited about the next release! Looking forward it. I keep seeing the issues people are posting on the wasser thread and i feel like telling them all to try your firmware instead because I've had none of the issues they keep posting. I definitely don't want to downplay wasser's work though, because i know he works very hard on it. I couldn't do it any better than either of you so I've got no rights to complain. Plus it's better to have as many ROM developers working as possible. Diversity in development leads to collaboration and better/faster fixes. Speaking of which, what ever happened to Finless Bob's ROM? And Leolas? No updates from them in forever. Maybe they're working on other projects. I might start looking at kernel code, it would be cool if I could get kvm working on RK3288.

So keep up the excellent work, mo! It is very much appreciated.
Cheers,
-SB