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I recently acquired the HDK8150 board. I am pretty interested in running a non-Android Linux OS there. After some hours of going through I found some interesting stuff:

  1. I found that from Linux kernel 5.4, is supporting Snapdragon 855, so far so good!

  2. There is one Ubuntu distribution named Ubuntu Core. It seems it fully supports Snapdragon, but it is pretty bound to the DragonBoard-410C.

  3. I found that there is an Ubuntu's parallel project named Linaro that looks pretty nice.

My point is that I would like to check out any of them, but I prefer not to flash the eMMC memory, but run the system from the SD card. I found it better, since I am pretty sure I am gonna mess up with something, and I am just starting with this. Is there anybody that has experience on this topic with this specific board? Is there any way to boot from the SD card? (It can be seen on the back that there are 8-switches labeled as "boot". There is no much documentation out there apart from the Quickstart guide.)

Any suggestions on which OS to use?

peterh
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Fran
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  • Apologize for the early closure, I just realized the board is "a highly integrated and optimized Android development platform". However, my advice still stands that you might be interested in our sister site [ubuntu.se], [unix.se], or [iot.se]. – Andrew T. Dec 23 '20 at 11:40
  • Okay, thanks Andrew :) – Fran Dec 23 '20 at 11:49
  • Booting from the sd card is not so hard, the hard thing is that you likely need to modify the bootloader for that. Possibly you can use the recovery partition as a chain-bootloader, but even so you need to unlock the device. Thus, you can not avoid the risk of bricking. But I think this is like a holy grail to me, hence the up. – peterh Dec 23 '20 at 23:57
  • In my this question I got also a lot of useful info, how drivers work differently in Android. The goal would be likely to have an X server, but graphic drivers work very differently. Possibly you can import the "X server of Android", namely "Surface Flinger" and run an X over it. If you have luck, then the graphic display of your device has a kernel driver and so you can use it (like as a /dev/fb0 device). – peterh Dec 24 '20 at 00:04
  • Currently, Linux GUI works so: apps -> X server -> kernel KMS. On Android: apps -> surface flinger -> HAL -> kernel. – peterh Dec 24 '20 at 00:05
  • just linking here for future reference. are you talking about dip switches (like in the link on the first question)? https://android.stackexchange.com/q/215573 https://android.stackexchange.com/q/210156 https://android.stackexchange.com/q/220677 https://android.stackexchange.com/q/213910 https://android.stackexchange.com/q/47712 – alecxs Dec 24 '20 at 00:28

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