I'm asking mostly out of curiosity.

There's now several projects that support ARM processors - but so far the only official Boinc client for non-x86 processors is for Android. Unless I'm wrong?

If there were a client for generic ARM linux, would it be able to make use of the ARM WUs that are currently crunched on Android?

Running Android must consume processing power too - so if this could be removed, it should make more power available to Boinc - effectively creating a dedicated Boinc device that wouldn't need much power or supervision. And should be cheap - I'm thinking single board computers, or old cell phones with the OS switched.

So, either I didn't succeed in searching the web, or my reasoning is inherently flawed, I guess?

Projects don't make special WUs for different processors - they're just data, and (in principle) could be processed on any platform.

What would need to be different is the science application. I'm not sure how much would have to be done to convert 'ARM for Android' to 'ARM for Linux' - hopefully just a new cross-compilation with different compiler switches, but each project would have to do at least that much for each of their applications. And test them, of course.

What would need to be different is the science application. I'm not sure how much would have to be done to convert 'ARM for Android' to 'ARM for Linux' - hopefully just a new cross-compilation with different compiler switches, but each project would have to do at least that much for each of their applications.

I see.
Hm. I hoped the actual calculation would be somewhat system independent.
Still, a recompile is far easier than the port to a different architecture.
Of course, the question is if it would be actually worth the trouble for them. Any device capable of crunching likely runs android already...

Debian have the BOINC client and manager available as packages for just about all of their supported processor types.

As the others have said the issue is around getting your favourite project to support the processor architecture. Asteroids support ARM as do Einstein (but for only 1 type of WU).. A number of projects will have their source available for a Linux app that you could recompile for your particular flavour of Linux/ARM.

I have a bunch of Raspberry Pi's currently on Einstein. The ARM v6 isn't exactly fast but as a cheap little cruncher they aren't too bad. There is also a port of the SETI multi beam v7 app for them.

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MarkJ