Follow-up Two: Mobian on the Pixel 3a / 3a XL

This is a follow-up to my earlier posts:

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/12809764 https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/19600671

We're Getting Closer.

It's just small stuff left that needs a bit of piecing together, though I've now been daily driving my port for the past two weeks already.

This Works

• booting
• display
• touch
• modem <- You might have to switch to the other slot if it does not work: mmcli -m 0 --set-primary-sim-slot=1, options are 1 or 2. Note that the modem could also be a different number, maybe try -m 1 if it is not found as the command will reboot the modem and then it changes.
• plymouth
• battery/charging
• mobile data
• wifi
• torch
• suspend
• call audio
• vibration
• Bluetooth™
• full disk encryption
• eSIM (I'm working on the packaging for the tool you need to provision it)
• SMS
• audio (ALSA config not packaged, but can be added manually)
• camera (have taken a few photos, but the kernel driver is still work in progress and sometimes it just does not work)

This Has An Unknown Status

• Fingerprint Sensor
• NFC (should work, does so on pmOS)

This Does Not Work Yet (Soon™)

• GPS
• USB host mode (no Kernel support yet, but apparently this is being worked on)
• Verified Boot (first need to do research whether this is actually feasible)

This Is Missing And Will Come Later

• accelerometer
• magnetometer
• ambient light sensor
• barometer

Project Status

To Do List

• Make installer images work on this device
• Have droid-juicer run on installer images
• Get into the repos: tinyalsa and q6voiced (I've already packaged both)
  • ITP for Tinyalsa: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1079473
  • ITP for q6voiced: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1080483
• Combine SDM670 kernel patches with those in the Mobian qcom kernel

Done List

• New release of qcom-phone-utils required so that my patches are available from the repo
  • https://salsa.debian.org/DebianOnMobile-team/qcom-phone-utils/-/commit/4f77281197c6ba1cfc1a82596157d00e8a7e014b (firmware folders)
  • https://salsa.debian.org/DebianOnMobile-team/qcom-phone-utils/-/commit/9aa29a1d0bd2327e9c74317d516a8aeecf820304 (fixes bootimg generation with LUKS)
  • https://salsa.debian.org/DebianOnMobile-team/qcom-phone-utils/-/commit/3ddb192b5c78b444065f23647b373ad66ce3617d (fixes on-screen keyboard for LUKS passphrase)
• Remove hard-coded value in the droid-juicer systemd unit
  • https://gitlab.com/mobian1/droid-juicer/-/issues/4
• Make sure my q6voiced package no longer includes a hard-coded config for this device (known solution, need to implement)
• add udev rule for the vibration motor to the right package
  • https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/devices/kernels/qcom-linux/-/issues/3
  • upstream: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/feedbackd/-/merge_requests/139

Misc Issues

• ALSA config for the device has not been upstreamed yet
• Issues with 5 GHz wifi
  • Can be worked around by forcing the phone to only use the 2.4 GHz band, for example using nmtui, the network settings of GNOME/Phosh are bit too simplistic for that
• No idea how to get the call audio on Bluetooth, meaning you will have to hold the phone or use a cable, for now

(This is a non-exhaustive list)

Low Priority

• create/find script/tool that brings up Bluetooth & then package it
  • https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/devices/kernels/qcom-linux/-/issues/5

Other than that... Everything should be there. It's definitely usable already.

Just a few smaller quirks to iron out and two packages to get into the repo.

The Sources (Use The Source, Luke)

• My efforts of packaging a device-specific kernel: https://salsa.debian.org/erebion/sdm-670-linux (which will be used until all patches are part of upstream Linux and we can finally use a regular mainline kernel)
• mobian-recipes, which is used to build images: https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/mobian-recipes
• droid-juicer, which retrieves some important files from some partitions: https://gitlab.com/mobian1/droid-juicer
• https://wiki.postmarketos.org (lovely folks, thanks for sharing everything you found out the hard way :D)

Thanks For All The Fish

Huge thanks to be sdm670-linux project and flamingradian who runs the project (just one person!) to make sure the Kernel works on those devices! :)

I don’t know how Kernel development works, so I would have never started porting without this project.

Find that here: https://gitlab.com/sdm670-mainline/linux

Questions Accepted / Ask Me Anything About The Project

I will gladly answer all questions, I hope that more people will start porting if it becomes clear that this is not arcane magic. It’s mostly just arcane. And a community of friendly people that try to be helpful.#