4 ms·
> Your Samsung, Xiaomi, ASUS, OnePlus or even Google device will not be running a mainline Linux kernel with wholly open drivers (ala x86) unless you get very,
by rjeli 6y ago
> Your Samsung, Xiaomi, ASUS, OnePlus or even Google device will not be running a mainline Linux kernel with wholly open drivers (ala x86) unless you get very, very lucky with your hardware choice.
Only half true. There is a lot of activity on linux-arm-msm, and mainlining is much easier than it would have been a few years ago. Snapdragon 845 has great support (3d accel, modem, all that) and if your specific phone isn’t ported yet, you just need a hundred lines or so of board-specific config.
Personally I’ve been mainlining my Xiaomi Redmi Note 8T, with an SDM665, a phone released Nov ‘19. It’s only taken a work week or so to boot pmos and get a shell over usb, the drivers are already all there. It would be a lot faster if this weren’t my first time ever doing kernel dev.
Yeah, it’s a lot of engineering effort, but it’s well within the scope of an evening-hacker community project.
- zozbot234 6y agoYes, of course you can have a "lucky" platform that ends up getting more support from hobbyists and OEM's alike. The SD845 gets used (in an overclocked version) for ARM laptops, that's why there's a lot of interest in having it work "properly" and even be usable as a comparatively "free" platform. Most Snapdragon chips do not get the same level of support.
- rjeli 6y agoAs I said in my reply, I have been porting my phone which has a 665, an SoC released 2 years after the 845, and it's a pretty smooth process. Each SoC has a different topology and vendor quirks, but they use the same few drivers and interconnects (glink, rpm, smd, etc). Many of the drivers I am using are for components more recent than the 845, upstreamed by Linaro and Qcom folks.