[Q] MTK6589 devices and Windows
- Thread starter Zilliman
- Start date
Impossible. Windows Phone 8 doesn't have the drivers to run on other devices, unless you're willing to program them yourself. Furthermore, I believe it's hardware locked because of Secure Boot. All devices have secure boot (unlike Windows 8, where only some computers have secure boot) and it is (I believe) a requirement, hence the inability to boot Windows Phone 8 on an Android device. Unless you're willing to emulate secure boot somewhat as well, then go for your life.
Want Windows Phone 8 on an Android device? Buy a Nokia Lumia and sticky tape it on top of your current Android device. Voila! Results are instant.
Honestly, if you want a certain OS on your phone, buy the phone that has the OS. It's like buying a tomato and then saying "fudge, wish this tasted like a cucumber".
Want Windows Phone 8 on an Android device? Buy a Nokia Lumia and sticky tape it on top of your current Android device. Voila! Results are instant.
Honestly, if you want a certain OS on your phone, buy the phone that has the OS. It's like buying a tomato and then saying "fudge, wish this tasted like a cucumber".
The idea comes straight from the world of PCs : there you can if you want to wipe the system clean and install almost anything you like. From MS-DOS to Windows 2, Windows NT, OS/2, dozens brands and copies of Linux, Unix mutations the list is almost endless.
The onboard ROM on a "PC" will happily run whatever's on the disk or CD or DVD or other boot device. This is a 1970'as design which has not changed.
If you are missing device drivers for a certain device on PC then it (a) defaults to basic functionality (b) this device does not work at all but it is not always a stopping block.
I did not know what the obstacles are on smartphones. I was hoping to find and understand more details.
The MTK65XX chip set is an Arm CPU for which Windows have a new system. Some Chinese tablets now sell with Android or Windows.
Thanks for the explanations.
The onboard ROM on a "PC" will happily run whatever's on the disk or CD or DVD or other boot device. This is a 1970'as design which has not changed.
If you are missing device drivers for a certain device on PC then it (a) defaults to basic functionality (b) this device does not work at all but it is not always a stopping block.
I did not know what the obstacles are on smartphones. I was hoping to find and understand more details.
The MTK65XX chip set is an Arm CPU for which Windows have a new system. Some Chinese tablets now sell with Android or Windows.
Thanks for the explanations.
Yeah, you might have saved yourself some time if you'd done even a little research. Not only do ARM devices require a Board Support Package (firmware image, basically) that generally won't be available for an arbitrary device/OS combination (it's not just a matter of having basic drivers like on x86), but there isn't actually any installer (at least, not publicly available) for Windows Phone. There's only full device images available, which are specific to their intended devices. Custom ROMs, even for variants of the same OS that the device shipped with, are hacked together and often don't have full hardware support, especially when switching between OSes. You would need to build one nearly from scratch for a device like yours, given that the manufacturer of it doesn't (so far as I know) sell *any* Windows Phone devices so you couldn't even crib drivers from another phone. Additionally, nearly all ARM devices ship with locked bootloaders that will not boot a different operating system, or even allow the OS to be tampered with (although these days, consumer Android device bootloaders can usually be unlocked).
Well then think of it this way, Install XP on a computer. Take the hard drive out and try to boot on another one. It won't work unless you have all the drivers or extremely similar hardware.
I don't have a complete understanding of ARM, but I assume these Qualcomm SoCs have the TPM built in. Its almost the bottleneck with using WP8, but we'll have to wait for HTC to release a potential dual boot Android Windows Phone. Things will align sometime.
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OK Here is how PC/Windows works:
When Windows boots it uses a thing called "HAL" (hardware abstraction layer) - and whilst booting it tries its best to cope with a number of chipsets, disc drive controllers, and other core hardware components. This is done on the fly because there are only so many chipsets out there and the drivers aren't that large. If you boot Windows in debug mode you will see it loading one million drivers for hardware which you definitely not have - and when you actually install it it does the same - it does not ask you " what CPU / north bridge / south bridge / other DMA/ chipset / and everything else you have?". It just tries it all and loads what fits. The only things left out are whatever you can load later, eg specific sound card drivers, wifi, video card etc.
So this is a marriage between the PC's BIOS ROMs and the OS - so that with one single CD you can install pretty much anywhere. And this idea and technology has been around since the 70s.
For Linux/Unix/OS/2 and anything else on the PC the idea is pretty much the same: the BIOS has " started " the machine for you, and you simply run your "application" which in most cases is a complete OS!
For example I once wrote a memory tester that booted straight off the drive, without any other OS being present, it is that simple once you have the BIOS in place.
In my complete ignorance of how smartphones are made, I assumed that the hardware manufacturer of each phone provides a BIOS which can provide basic services like on the PC. Is that what we call the "bootloader" ? Looking at the "scatter files" it appears there is a whole lot of binary images before the "android" image.
Are these images the "hardware layer / BIOS" then? And can we consider the "android" image to be the actual OS?
You don't understand the basic problem.
Windows (desktop) is an entirely different OS which has very powerful hardware at its disposal and it is supposed to run on various hardware configurations. It was designed to be this way from the ground up.
Windows Phone is just not like that. It is designed to work with one configuration, and one configuration alone. You can;t even flash the WP8 image from one device model to another without risking brick.
If you try to flash the lumia 1520 ROM on a lumia 820, chances are the lumia 820 will brick.
In other words, WP8 does not load "millions" of drivers in hope of matching the single one the system matches. There are various technical and marketing reasons why this does not happen.
And it is like this for android as well. Getting past the bootloader is easy (for android devices). Getting to actually boot something is an entirely different story.
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