5 ms·

> Alright, so there is the LineageOS community, which provides weekly updates for an impressive number of smartphones. They provide a practical solution today,

by kasbah 9y ago

> Alright, so there is the LineageOS community, which provides weekly updates for an impressive number of smartphones. They provide a practical solution today, and I am very grateful for that. However, such Android based projects will always run behind Google and the phone industry, fixing only symptoms but never the root-cause. I think it's very ambitious to not base this off of the work being done on Android but of course would love a proper GNU/Linux distro on my phone as well. Lineage OS (formerly CyanogenMod) will run on a Samsung S II which is 5 years old. It might support some older devices that I am not aware of. I could see it still being supported 5 years down the line. https://download.lineageos.org/ https://download.lineageos.org/

StavrosK 9y ago
Wow, they have up-to-date images for the previous version of LineageOS for the Google Nexus, even. Has anyone tried it on such an old phone? Is it dog-slow?
- limeblack 9y ago
  Yes it is slow at least on the nexus I tried it on. It may have been improved since then.
- kasbah 9y ago
  I don't know if you count it as an old phone but I use it on a Samsung SIII (Wikipedia says that launched 2012) and it's snappy as heck. The current images are nightlies so I have encountered a few bugs. Previously was running CyanogenMod 13 on a stable image and that was fine (but the CyanogenMod company folded so it wasn't going to get security updates). Looking forward to a stable release of Lineage.
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    Very interesting, thanks. Which Android version is LOS 13?
    - kasbah 9y ago
      ~I don't think Lineage OS 13 exists.~ (edit: it seems it does for some models). CyanogenMod 13 was Android 6 I believe and Lineage 14 nightlies are currently 7.1.2.
      - StavrosK 9y ago
        Hmm, this says 13.0? Maybe they mean CM 13: https://download.lineageos.org/maguro https://download.lineageos.org/maguro
        mod50ack 9y ago
        LineageOS 13 is the continuation of CM 13. It's Marshmallow, but there are the latest security updates.
      - voidz 9y ago
        It exists. But I guess I get why you might be thinking this: with CM13 there were nightly builds for lots and lots of devices, but with LOS13 they heavily reduced the amount of devices for which they build nightlies. I'm not sure if this means that they ceased to support LOS13 for these devices entirely. But it does seem that way, on account of how long it's been since the device tree ('DT') and kernel for my phone have seen any update. (HTC One M9, a.k.a. himaul) Nowadays I just build LOS13 myself every once in a while, because it still receives generic updates and fixes, and luckily the current kernel and DT still work fine. It's just that, while the DT also wasn't updated that often back on CM13, iirc the kernel did receive updates and fixes fairly regularly. With that no longer being the case is why I suspect they halted supporting it at all. My reason for staying on LOS13 rather than to upgrade to LOS14 is that the Xposed Framework does not exist for LOS14 / Android N. So that's what I'm waiting for. I wish the LOS13 would recognize how many people want to use 13 on the M9 and provide updates even if it's just once a month. Or maybe they do recognise this, but they just don't have the manpower, resources, or heck maybe there were too many problems when users switched from CM to LOS... I don't know. There is just one really annoying error which I don't know how to fix, which is that the default camera app crashes, I suspect because of face detection. I thought they fixed that on CM13 ages ago. I guess he bug snuck back in. The OpenCamera does not crash, thank heavens, but it's still a nasty issue I wish would be addressed. Anyway. My point was that it's still possible to build LOS13 for many devices.
- zxv 9y ago
  For the most common apps, no, it's not slower in my experience on Nexus 5, 7, 10 and some Samsung tablets. For older devices, there are performance improvements in the ahead-of-time compilation with upgrades in major versions of the OS. That helps. Lack of multimedia hardware support for older devices in newer apps can still be an issue. Running Lineage OS 13 on a nexus 10, I see great performance for all the default apps and google apps. The main source of performance issues I see is apps that do not support the multimedia hardware (eg. arm neon on Nexus 10). Some video apps such as Directv now, HBO GO don't use neon, overheat with high cpu use as a result. Those that do support neon work great, including Netflix and Hulu. So it also depends on app support for hardware.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  I installed CyanogenMod 12 (or maybe 11) on a Nexus S. It was in fact dog-slow.
- rjblackman 9y ago
  If anything newer android versions seem to get faster and use less battery on my nexus 4. I'm trying to avoid resource hungry apps like spotify, google play and Facebook though so ymmv.
vomitcuddle 9y ago
Yeah, what raised a red flag when reading this project's description was that having a single kernel for all devices and no compatibility layer like libhybris is unfortunately an unrealistic goal in the world of ARM android devices. An approach that is less likely to result in vaporware would be to maintain ports of Halium to older devices based on LineageOS kernels/drivers, with an optional Alpine Linux userspace. Otherwise this project is little more than README.md Hacker News bait.
- ndesaulniers 9y ago
  Isn't that solved by device tree w/ overlays? (I don't know much about ARMv7).
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    Very few mobile phone arm devices support device trees. Only Windows Mobile phones provided UEFI (with locked bootloaders). Most ARM devices just attach random shit to random pins and have totally non-upstreamable kernels.
- ollieparanoid 9y ago
  > A (nearly) mainline kernel running on the Nexus 7 https://lwn.net/Articles/680109/ https://lwn.net/Articles/680109/ If there are enough helping hands, we could do this as a community. The bootstrap program, pmbootstrap, is a working base component that makes development much easier (alone the automatically set up cross-compiling with distcc, ccache, armhf and native chroot), so it is definitely more than a README.md. Also the title says, that the project is "aiming" - which does not say it has reached any of its goals yet. But at some point it needs to be announced to the community, so I might as well do that now, at a point, where other hackers could join in and parallelize development.
  - vomitcuddle 9y ago
    Could you help me understand your reasoning behind not pairing up with or taking advantage of existing projects like Halium or LineageOS? I'd love to run mainline Linux without any Android cruft on my old phones, but realise that this would take a lot of effort per each device. Each Android device is different, with its own kernel patches, proprietary modules and sometimes Android-specific userspace HALs. The Tegra in the Nexus 7 was designed to run non-Android Linux, there are native X11 drivers for that thing - that's not the case for devices like my current phone.

by kasbah 9y ago

StavrosK 9y ago

Wow, they have up-to-date images for the previous version of LineageOS for the Google Nexus, even. Has anyone tried it on such an old phone? Is it dog-slow?

limeblack 9y ago
Yes it is slow at least on the nexus I tried it on. It may have been improved since then.
kasbah 9y ago
I don't know if you count it as an old phone but I use it on a Samsung SIII (Wikipedia says that launched 2012) and it's snappy as heck. The current images are nightlies so I have encountered a few bugs. Previously was running CyanogenMod 13 on a stable image and that was fine (but the CyanogenMod company folded so it wasn't going to get security updates). Looking forward to a stable release of Lineage.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  Very interesting, thanks. Which Android version is LOS 13?
  - kasbah 9y ago
    ~I don't think Lineage OS 13 exists.~ (edit: it seems it does for some models). CyanogenMod 13 was Android 6 I believe and Lineage 14 nightlies are currently 7.1.2.
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      Hmm, this says 13.0? Maybe they mean CM 13: https://download.lineageos.org/maguro https://download.lineageos.org/maguro
      - mod50ack 9y ago
        LineageOS 13 is the continuation of CM 13. It's Marshmallow, but there are the latest security updates.
    - voidz 9y ago
      It exists. But I guess I get why you might be thinking this: with CM13 there were nightly builds for lots and lots of devices, but with LOS13 they heavily reduced the amount of devices for which they build nightlies. I'm not sure if this means that they ceased to support LOS13 for these devices entirely. But it does seem that way, on account of how long it's been since the device tree ('DT') and kernel for my phone have seen any update. (HTC One M9, a.k.a. himaul) Nowadays I just build LOS13 myself every once in a while, because it still receives generic updates and fixes, and luckily the current kernel and DT still work fine. It's just that, while the DT also wasn't updated that often back on CM13, iirc the kernel did receive updates and fixes fairly regularly. With that no longer being the case is why I suspect they halted supporting it at all. My reason for staying on LOS13 rather than to upgrade to LOS14 is that the Xposed Framework does not exist for LOS14 / Android N. So that's what I'm waiting for. I wish the LOS13 would recognize how many people want to use 13 on the M9 and provide updates even if it's just once a month. Or maybe they do recognise this, but they just don't have the manpower, resources, or heck maybe there were too many problems when users switched from CM to LOS... I don't know. There is just one really annoying error which I don't know how to fix, which is that the default camera app crashes, I suspect because of face detection. I thought they fixed that on CM13 ages ago. I guess he bug snuck back in. The OpenCamera does not crash, thank heavens, but it's still a nasty issue I wish would be addressed. Anyway. My point was that it's still possible to build LOS13 for many devices.
zxv 9y ago
For the most common apps, no, it's not slower in my experience on Nexus 5, 7, 10 and some Samsung tablets. For older devices, there are performance improvements in the ahead-of-time compilation with upgrades in major versions of the OS. That helps. Lack of multimedia hardware support for older devices in newer apps can still be an issue. Running Lineage OS 13 on a nexus 10, I see great performance for all the default apps and google apps. The main source of performance issues I see is apps that do not support the multimedia hardware (eg. arm neon on Nexus 10). Some video apps such as Directv now, HBO GO don't use neon, overheat with high cpu use as a result. Those that do support neon work great, including Netflix and Hulu. So it also depends on app support for hardware.
thaumasiotes 9y ago
I installed CyanogenMod 12 (or maybe 11) on a Nexus S. It was in fact dog-slow.
rjblackman 9y ago
If anything newer android versions seem to get faster and use less battery on my nexus 4. I'm trying to avoid resource hungry apps like spotify, google play and Facebook though so ymmv.

vomitcuddle 9y ago

Yeah, what raised a red flag when reading this project's description was that having a single kernel for all devices and no compatibility layer like libhybris is unfortunately an unrealistic goal in the world of ARM android devices. An approach that is less likely to result in vaporware would be to maintain ports of Halium to older devices based on LineageOS kernels/drivers, with an optional Alpine Linux userspace. Otherwise this project is little more than README.md Hacker News bait.

ndesaulniers 9y ago
Isn't that solved by device tree w/ overlays? (I don't know much about ARMv7).
- djsumdog 9y ago
  Very few mobile phone arm devices support device trees. Only Windows Mobile phones provided UEFI (with locked bootloaders). Most ARM devices just attach random shit to random pins and have totally non-upstreamable kernels.
ollieparanoid 9y ago
> A (nearly) mainline kernel running on the Nexus 7 https://lwn.net/Articles/680109/ https://lwn.net/Articles/680109/ If there are enough helping hands, we could do this as a community. The bootstrap program, pmbootstrap, is a working base component that makes development much easier (alone the automatically set up cross-compiling with distcc, ccache, armhf and native chroot), so it is definitely more than a README.md. Also the title says, that the project is "aiming" - which does not say it has reached any of its goals yet. But at some point it needs to be announced to the community, so I might as well do that now, at a point, where other hackers could join in and parallelize development.
- vomitcuddle 9y ago
  Could you help me understand your reasoning behind not pairing up with or taking advantage of existing projects like Halium or LineageOS? I'd love to run mainline Linux without any Android cruft on my old phones, but realise that this would take a lot of effort per each device. Each Android device is different, with its own kernel patches, proprietary modules and sometimes Android-specific userspace HALs. The Tegra in the Nexus 7 was designed to run non-Android Linux, there are native X11 drivers for that thing - that's not the case for devices like my current phone.