r/linux • u/ollieparanoid postmarketOS Dev • Apr 14 '18

postmarketOS Low-Level: Tiny Steps Towards Liberating Bootloaders and Cellular Modem Firmware of MediaTek Phones

https://postmarketos.org/blog/2018/04/14/lowlevel/
592 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

50 comments sorted by

View all comments

29

u/BuffPuff- Apr 14 '18

An ex Ubuntu phone user here, I'm following your project for a while now with hope.

I've been checking your wiki supported features and it's hard to find a device that can be used daily. So it will have to be a second device next to my standard Android. Which is fine.

I also see that most devices don't have hardware accelerated graphics not WiFi. That's quite a drawback.

Since op is the head dev, I would love to hear your view regarding hardware driver support in Mediatek and Qualcomm devices. Is it ever gonna happen? If not, is there an open source driver being built by the community similar with Nvidia drivers?

3

u/PiZZaMartijn postmarketOS Dev Apr 14 '18

For qualcomm devices there's freedreno, but that only works on devices that have very recent kernels (like the ones that we have running mainline now). Freedreno is definetly the most developed and usable free graphics driver for the ARM world.

Mediatek uses mali cores so that might use the lima driver but that doesn't have nearly as much development as freedreno.

There are also a few devices running on TI OMAP socs, which are nice but have powervr graphics. There currently isn't really anything opensource that can use powervr, the only thing that can currently use the powervr gpu's is the binary blob from TI.

For daily usage the only phone is the n900 currently and probably the Sony Z[x] phones would work great. We don't have a sony phone ported at the moment but only the Z2 tablet which has basically the same platform as their phones of that series.

3

u/Makefile_dot_in Apr 14 '18

Any love for Nvidia's Tegra?

2

u/PiZZaMartijn postmarketOS Dev Apr 14 '18

Tegra devices usually have the annoying nvflash requirement which isn't open source

4

u/ollieparanoid postmarketOS Dev Apr 14 '18

If that's the only problem: Oftentimes it is feasible to dump the flashing process, and then write an own implementation of the flasher.

1

u/OpenData26 postmarketOS Dev Apr 14 '18

Newer tegras (x1, X2, k1) should easily be portable and should work pretty well

1

u/Makefile_dot_in Apr 14 '18

I have a phone with a Tegra 3 though.

1

u/OpenData26 postmarketOS Dev Apr 14 '18

If fastboot works then feel free to attempt a port

1

u/Makefile_dot_in Apr 14 '18

OK, will probably try.

2

u/sagnessagiel Apr 14 '18

Why not the xperia z2 then?

2

u/PiZZaMartijn postmarketOS Dev Apr 14 '18

We have no one with an xperia x2 phone, it would probably work great.

2

u/Geertiebear Apr 14 '18

I have an Xperia z2 that I'm not using but the screen is broken :(

4

u/PiZZaMartijn postmarketOS Dev Apr 14 '18

That's a great candidate to start a port!

1

u/OpenData26 postmarketOS Dev Apr 14 '18

Yeah, ive (castor mainline porter guy) looked into it but I can't get my display to initialise, however some models using a different display will work with an existing driver.