Device Tree Patches Posted for Review to Boot Linux on Apple A7 to A11 Devices | Hacker News Reader

Device Tree Patches Posted for Review to Boot Linux on Apple A7 to A11 Devices

phoronix.com

55 pointsbestouff11 comments

Using my old iPhones as extra computers would be amazing. Imagine running plex off your iPhone X plugged in a closet somewhere.

The last iPhone that would be supported with these patches would be the iPhone 8. So unfortunately no Linux on anything more up to date :/

An iPhone 8 still has a lot of processing power for headless home server tasks. I use a much weaker ARM dev board as an ssh gateway and Wireguard VPN into my home network and it works just fine. The only thing I'd worry about is leaving the battery on the phone and having it puff up after being trickle charged for months on end.

But if you remove the battery and mod the phone to power it directly from an external power supply you're all set!

I read it as supporting the iphone X with the A11 chip, just not the gpio buttons.

"This series adds device trees for all A7-A11 SoC based iPhones, iPads, iPod touches and Apple TVs."

"The following is supported on A7-A10: - gpio-keys The buttons on A11 based devices like the iPhone X is a SMC subdevice, and cannot be supported in this way."

People already do this with Android phones. There's a downside: the battery is going to bulge in no time if you keep the phone plugged in all the time.

There are some workarounds (open the phone, solder a power supply to the battery terminals, add a capacitor and a resistor for good measure) but you'd need quite a repairable phone to pull that off easily.

I've always liked that demo of some person running a tiny ARM k8s cluster on his old Oneplus 1, but I'm not sure if I'd like to put the effort in to make it actually be usable in the long term. Still, the above-average transcoding abilities of pretty much every mobile SoC of the last decade and a half could be an interesting addition to a small home lab.

Huh, I assumed relatively modern phones would have overcharge protection? Maybe even bypassing the battery when plugged in and fully charged?

Would be very interesting to use an AppleTV like a Linux machine similar to how the first gen device was hacked

What would be the practical use case for this?

Like a Linux phone or more like a raspberry like device?

Otherwise useless phones would be cool as battery backed raspberry like devices

If people come up with a good way to hack the Apple TV, or at least the older ones that still have the USB-C port, that could be an interesting device.

Even older iPads have reasonably fast CPUs and better displays than most of what you can buy off the shelf. Old iOS devices are kind of a pain to deal with but Linux on those platforms would be really useful even if only to turn the thing into a calendar or picture frame.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com