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Comment by joey_spaztard | Hacker News Reader

So ... you can run an x86_64 cpu emulator on a smartphone.

That's wonderful, and a hundredth of native speed if you are lucky.

The example boot log says 2000 BogoMips, so about a fiftieth of the cpu speed of a contemporary entry level laptop, to a very rough approximation.

Also, no hardware graphics acceleration.

There are some possible uses I suppose. Including the charger and a 3.5" USB hdd I guess it could burn 20 watts to download or upload some torrents, run a IRC client, run a local dev web-server or whatever.

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.

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What is with the defeatism? It all starts somewhere. I moved on from desktop computers 10+ years ago. I've only owned laptops, and I've stayed on laptops because I cannot do "everything" to a reasonable practicality on smartphones. This is one of those pieces I need.

It's not fast today, but it's possible and portable.

> 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.

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.

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

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

We are going to nuke ourselves before that.

It could start next month for all we know.

> 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.

thing is, smartphones are the most popular sbc on the planet

Complain to the companies that cripple good hardware, not the hackers that tirelessly re-enable it.

I think this stuff (Termux, Winlator, etc.) is a lot more developed and popular than you think. There's GPU acceleration through VirGL so some older games seem to work alright.

I've used Termux to run utilities like ffmpeg and imagemagick on the go. I think one of the limitations for graphical usage might be the limited memory space that it's sharing with Android. It's intriguing that this usbredirect setup allows swap space allocation without root.

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