The iPhone dev team, hard at work as usual, announced a successful iPhone Linux port today. It’s still at a very early stage, but the kernel boots on first and second generation iPhones and the first generation iPod touch. A framebuffer driver and a working Busybox installation point to an exciting open source future:
What we have:
– Framebuffer driver
– Serial driver
– Serial over USB driver
– Interrupts, MMU, clock, etc.What we have in openiboot (but hasn’t been ported yet):
– Read-only support for the NAND
What we don’t have (yet!):
– Write support for the NAND
– Wireless networking
– Touchscreen
– Sound
– Accelerometer
– Baseband support
If you’re a Linux hacker and want to pitch in with the porting process, hop on the #iphonelinux IRC channel at irc.osx86.hu.
iPhone Linux – Official Announcement
It’s just a demo at this point, but if you can’t wait to see this running on your own phone, here’s what you need:
Installation Instructions
iphonelinux-demo.tar.gz
ADVERTISEMENT