this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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Linux Phones
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Community about running GNU/Linux on phones. Projects like Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, PostmarketOS, Mobian etc. Either on former Android phones or hardware like the PinePhone.
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Awesome work! If you don't mind me asking, what help/sources did you use to get this far in porting efforts? I have some free time on my hands and would like to try porting a newer phone such a pixel 4a or similar
Oh, I don't mind questions. :)
Help: A lot via the Mobian Ports ( #mobian-ports:matrix.org ) Matrix room and the postmarketOS offtopic ( #offtopic:postmarketos.org ) Matrix room.
Sources: Not much there yet. As soon as there are official builds for the Pixel 3a, I will start writing docs. I already have a lot of notes on what I had to do. But first I need to have someone merge the Kernel patches, as I don't know C, which makes resolving merge conflicts really hard, it turns out. Once that is done, there are just a few smaller merge requests left and builds will appear magically.
The whole process is not that difficult if there are already Kernel patches available. In the case of the Pixel 3a, I only had to clone the sdm670-mainline repo ( https://gitlab.com/sdm670-mainline/linux-patches ) , compile the kernel (two commands) and get a .deb, which I used with mobian-recipes ( https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/mobian-recipes/ ) to build an image. I then wrote a config file for droid-juicer ( https://gitlab.com/mobian1/droid-juicer/-/merge_requests/4 ) which tells it what files on the vendor and modem partitions it should get, then those are copied to
/usr/lib/firmware/updates/
.That was easy as
dmesg
will just tell you what files it cannot load because they are missing. Just find those, write the config, rundroid-juicer
, reboot... boom. Display, Wifi, LTE and so on working.Then smaller stuff like udev rules for vibration and an initramfs hook ( https://salsa.debian.org/DebianOnMobile-team/qcom-phone-utils/-/blob/debian/latest/initramfs-tools/hooks/qcom-firmware?ref_type=heads ) so that firmware files get integrated into initramfs and components start to work early during boot.
The most difficult part would be merging the Kernel patches with other patches and resoving the merge conflicts... At least to me, as I don't know C.
If there are no mainlining efforts for a phone yet, then I don't know what to do, as that requires a Kernel dev.
For the Pixel 4a you mentioned, there is a postmarketOS port. So this should be doable. ( https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Google_Pixel_4a_(google-sunfish) )
That's all not that hard, my main difficulty was finding out what to do. Everything I did so far would be an afternoon of work, if I had just found the necessary information much quicker. Instead I spent two weeks, of which 95 % was finding info, lol.
Just join the Mobian Matrix room, we should be able to help you, even though I know far less than the others there...so far. :p
I do hope that's helpful and I'll happily try to answer more questions. :)
Kernel mainlining effort for the SoC in thr Pixel 4a: https://github.com/sm7150-mainline/linux
I know C and I have a pixel 3a. I could probably help out with the kernel patches if you want. I'm not totally clear what work needs to be done. You just need someone to help get those patches merged against the mobian upstream kernel?
Cool! Well, it's just a merge conflict. I don't knoe how to combine the patches. Should be pretty easy for someone that does not need to google for every line of C.
I can give you notes* later on what to do to get to the conflict, then maybe you can resolve it and push the result to some repo? :)
*Just 3 or 4 commands, I think, including the Debian gbp command
Yeah sure. I'll pull it all down and reproduce and try to get the conflicts sorted out and push the repo up somewhere. I've never built a Debian kernel before but I'm sure I can figure it out!