Ah man, costs aside, that's my last weekend and probably the next few ones as I've been trying to make my old Motorola Xoom tablet run a modern kernel. When/if that's completed, the return on investment will be a net loss.
It's quite satisfying to have grown from "struggling to build from source" to hunting 2.36 era patches and diving in the code to port it. A lot of actual learning in the process.
If I can convince myself to not fall into the rabbit hole of rebuilding my blog first, I'll definitely write about my porting efforts :)
Well, you could have just sat on the couch watching mindless tv instead.
Considering this is a 10 years old android tablet that cost at the time ~300$. I probably could have bought directly a more modern one which is known to be flashable with linux.
The sentence I cited resonate for me as I often dive in a project and follow in the rabbit holes even though I know it's a bit irrational to do it.
About how to do it: - you first have to find every git repo that may have relevant patches for this or similar device. There's the one open-sourced from the manufacturer, Google has one dedicated to the Tegra chipset, with more recent stuff but without any specifics about that device. - determine what parts are relevant: definitely the board definition, the drivers. But then, that file weirdly named which appears to handle interrupts? Well better take it. - adapt to changes in kernel interfaces: I've only come across name changes for now, but you can imagine it gets more complex - finally: compile, flash, test! And probably keep doing that for a few cycles.
I have a number of similar projects and can relate to how easy it is to follow rabbit holes.