BSD on a Canon DSLR rather than a Toaster

[ADJ]

I saw this thread on the Magic Lantern forum:

http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/ind...?topic=14847.0

The original post appeared on April Fool's Day but it seems that there might be the possibility to run Linux on the camera. If that is possible (it's beyond my level of knowledge) then would it be possible to run NetBSD or some other BSD on the cameras too? I see that NetBSD seems to run on lots of devices http://www.ki.nu/~makoto/p15/20150315 so maybe Canon cameras are achievable too. Toasters seem a bit too Red Dwarf to be believable.

As a secondary question most of the relevant cameras have Compact Flash or SD cards formatted to FAT32 or exFAT. Would it be possible to format the cards as ffs or ext2fs or zfs and still get the camera to work either with canon's firmware or with magic lantern's?

[bsd-keith]

Cameras have processors, so need an O/S to run on it. If the processor is supported by an O/S, then you will need drivers to operate the various micro motors, etc, etc. Obviously it can be done, as they wouldn't work otherwise.

[ADJ]

Thanks for that. I think the ARM946ES processor is third party supported by NetBSD but the details are beyond me. http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic...a/DVI0022A.pdf From the original ML post:

"Starting from our recent discovery about display access from bootloader, we thought, hey, we could now have full control of the resources from this embedded computer. At this stage, we knew what kind of ARM processor we have (ARM 946E-S), how much RAM we have (256MB/512MB depending on the model), how to print things on the display (portable code), how to handle timers and interrupts, how to do low-level SD card access on select models (600D and 5D3), and had a rough idea where to start looking for button events."

[Oko]

One of large Japanese printer manufacturers uses NetBSD to drive their printer controllers. Sony Playstation runs FreeBSD. So for all I know Canon might be using its own in-house fork of NetBSD to drive those camera controllers. They don't have to disclose anything. That is a nature of BSD licensing model. However it would be nice if they give back to community by paying few kids to hack NetBSD as a part of their graduate degree requirement. Historically that is the second part of BSD licensing model.

[IdOp]

Well, they would have to essentially reproduce the license in the documentation. This includes the copyright notice, which would refer to the NetBSD Foundation. I guess you wouldn't know exactly what or how much of it they used though.

[DaBSD]

Nice, I was going to ask for the same..

[ADJ]

In case anyone's interested they now have it working in QEMU too. http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/ind...4768#msg144768

QEMU works in NetBSD as well as FreeBSD from what I can gather.
https://wiki.freebsd.org/qemu