https://mobile.nixos.org/ * Mobile NixOS * Getting Started * Resources * Devices List NixOS on my phone? It's quickly becoming a reality! Look at the devices list to see if your device is already supported. Otherwise, read about the porting process to understand if you can get NixOS on your phone. News Items March and April 2021 round-up May 4th 2021 This update is the sixteenth in a series of regular updates on the state of the project. Only changes that have been accepted and merged in Mobile NixOS are chronicled here. There's always more work currently in-progress. Notable changes During the two months 11 pull requests were merged. This sounds like there's not much that has been happening, but this is only half of the story. Plasma Mobile support in NixOS A good portion of my time has been spent working on adding support for Plasma Mobile in NixOS. The pull request needs some work still, as there are issues, mainly dealing with Wayland and Plasma integration with NixOS. With that said, a draft for a Mobile NixOS demo image using Plasma Mobile was also made. It relies on the NixOS changes. After all, Mobile NixOS is a superset composed on top of NixOS. I wouldn't recommend anyone to use it at the moment, but it's not a disaster. It's the final paper cuts, the final 10% that needs 90% of the work. It's close to being done, yet far from being over. Phosh support in NixOS Some community members, starting way back in May 2020, and even before, were working on their side on adding Phosh support in NixOS @zhaofengli ran the last mile in #121226, with the initial support for Phosh in NixOS. There is also an example configuration demo system for Phosh for Mobile NixOS. Since Phosh is already being built in Nixpkgs, you can take inspiration from that example configuration and start using it at this moment. I invite you to follow through to the different pull requests, and thank the involved individuals. Device-specific changes Pinephone improvements * The kernel was updated (#321) * Sound support was fixed (#337) * Gadget mode was fixed (#340) Ports Support for one new device was merged in this period. * Pine64 PineTab (pine64-pinetab) [@zhaofengli] (#331) Bringing the total of devices to 18. February 2021 round-up March 2nd 2021 This update is the fifteenth in a series of regular updates on the state of the project. Only changes that have been accepted and merged in Mobile NixOS are chronicled here. There's always more work currently in-progress. Notable changes During the month 18 pull requests were merged. Compared to the last month, they're more subtle changes. More hermetic evaluation This started off the work from @eamsden, where uses of were removed almost everywhere in #238. With the changes, the value is now used only at one location, at the start of the evaluation, in a way that can be overridden easily if needed. This means that evaluation now works fine without a NIX_PATH. This is useful to allow users of Nix flakes to use the project. Similar changes were made in #310 to rely on a single value for release.nix and example configuration evaluations. Finalize stage-0 When #262 was merged in December, it was done so with two main features missing. Time was taken to finish the boot features for stage-0 in #300. When a device supports stage-0 boot, a new toggle is shown in the generations list allowing the user to skip rebooting into the generation's kernel. When booting a generation, the device tree built from the same kernel source tree is now used. The pull request itself contains technical details. This was less trivial than expected. armv7 works again Using armv7 with Nixpkgs or NixOS is not always easy. There is no binary cache, and cross-compilation is as YMMV as it is for AArch64. This is the reason why armv7 Mobile NixOS devices haven't seen much work done and things slowly started not working. With #306 time was taken to ensure contributors with armv7 devices wouldn't be left with hard to debug issues from Mobile NixOS itself. With this work finally taken care of, there is a recent known good starting point to use for armv7 devices. A few recent WIP device ports were made on top of these changes. Stay tuned as they may become supported devices at some point in the future. * #307 asus-sparrow: init * #311 amazon-austin: init Android Flashable Zips With #320, Android flashable zip support was added to Mobile NixOS. This is used to produce .zip files that can be installed to the devices using the mechanism commonly used to apply OTA updates in Android. Why would this new flashing method be needed or desired? First, it is more universal than fastboot, as some OEMs implement alternative flashing modes in their devices (e.g. Odin for Samsung). Then, some devices (e.g. oneplus-oneplus3) have problematic fastboot flash behaviours when flashing to the userdata partition. Some devices (e.g. amazon-austin) need to apply some out-of-band "fixes" to the boot images, which happens for free when using a flashable zip. With that said, all methods to flash the system to the device should produce the same outcome in most cases. As long as your device boots fine, there is no reason to prefer one or the other flashing method. Device-specific changes Wi-Fi support for Pixel XL Following last month's updates, @danielfullmer made the required changes to enable Wi-Fi for google-marlin (#295). Ports No new port were made in February. There is still a total of 17 devices you can build for. January 2021 round-up February 2nd 2021 This update is the fourteenth in a series of regular updates on the state of the project. Only changes that have been accepted and merged in Mobile NixOS are chronicled here. There's always more work currently in-progress. Notable changes During the month 18 pull requests were merged. Buckle-up, this month there's a lot to say. Go go all USB gadget modes A couple changes this month are related to USB gadget mode. This is the name of the feature allowing a device (your cellphone) to be used as a USB device on your computer. Target disk mode This is not a fresh feature, the implementation pull request was opened in March 2020. Once a device is booted with this example system, the device's internal storage is made available over USB, as if it was a USB mass storage device. The feature is limited to select devices, as it can be easily misused. The pine64-pinephone and asus-dumo devices are configured for this feature. It is limited as the block device to export has to be configured on a per-device basis. A further reason is the following: Target disk mode should not be used to export the full drive of Android-based devices as it becomes trivial to brick a device. Some of their partitions should not be touched. Warning This is because for most Android-based devices, part of their basic firmware needed for booting is found on the main block device. Erasing or modifying the wrong partition would be like erasing the BIOS from your computer. Broader ADB support Time was taken to understand why ADB didn't work on newer Android-based devices. It was initially suspected that the ADB daemon was incompatible with GadgetFS and FunctionFS. It was much more trivial. The FunctionFS feature of the kernel needed the daemon to be started at a specific moment during the configuration, rather than at any time after. With the fixes in #290 any device with GadgetFS can use ADB. This means inspecting newer Android-based devices is easier, as it will most likely work if the device boots with a vendor kernel. Using ADB is not limited to Android-based devices. The asus-dumo device is confirmed to be able to also use ADB. It is now the recommended basic method for getting a shell into a Mobile NixOS device, as it is easier to use than rndis. LVGUI updates A few updates were bundled together in #285. A few improvements to the early boot toolkit. DRM support Our toolkit used for user interfaces during early boot can now use DRM for rendering, in addition to fbdev. The old framebuffer support is still present. In fact, compiling with DRM support implicitly also builds with fbdev support, as it will fall back to fbdev if DRM cannot be used. This allows one unique build to be used across devices with and without DRM support. Adding support for DRM gives us an additional method of rendering. Some vendor kernels have broken fbdev implementations, like the SDM845 found in the razer-cheryl2 phone. With this change, early boot can be used on this device. DRM is also the "future" of rendering on Linux. Well, it is the present of rendering on Linux. This is why it is now the preferred method to render the interface, when possible. Libinput support The evdev-based input driver has been replaced with a libinput driver. Libinput is the current recommended method for handling input with Linux. Evdev being one of the primitive constructs it uses. Compared to the previous evdev driver used, there should be no differences with basic behaviour. Mainly, this was a clean-up, allowing us to remove some hacks that were used to identify device types with evdev. Libinput intrinsically knows more about the device than evdev did. Device-specific changes Wi-Fi support for qcacld-2.0 devices The requirements for devices with qcacld-2.0 Wi-Fi hardware have been identified. Support has been added in the following pull requests for the following devices: * #280 samsung-a5y17lte * #289 oneplus-oneplus3 The following device also uses qcacld-2.0 Wi-Fi. Support has not been added yet. * google-marlin Initial support for Samsung Galaxy A5 (2017) Support for the Samsung Galaxy A5 (2017) has been added. It is the first Exynos device in Mobile NixOS, with an Exynos 7880. The device is otherwise unremarkable, it turns out that Mobile NixOS mostly just worked with Samsung's initial boot flow. It required some minor adjustments, which are likely to help with their other phones and tablets. Pinephone U-Boot update January saw the release of U-Boot 2021.01. Mobile NixOS was already one version late, as 2020.10 was never packaged. As with the previous update, upstream U-Boot is used, preferring to import well-identified patches for the remaining features desired. This change should change nothing for many users. Users with a 3GB variant of the Pinephone will be relieved to know that they can now boot Mobile NixOS without additional work. Other notable changes * #287 Fixes job control in the initrd shell * #292 asus-dumo gadget mode Ports One new device was merged in January. * Galaxy A5 (2017) (samsung-a5y17lte) [@samueldr] (#278) Bringing the total of devices to 17. 2020 in the rear-view mirror January 11th 2021 The year 2020 was my first full calendar year dedicated to working on the Mobile NixOS project. Let's look at the progress, from the state of the project before January 2020, up to the state after December 2020. Comparisons will start from the last commit of 2019, 7803d9ec0e35fe602f75d08e6bcb6db720ad897c. They are compared against the last commit for 2020, d5869523869eb029b712a3f2b7b1c3199874f221. You might also be interested in looking at all the merged pull requests for 2020. Some numbers They're quite arbitrary. I don't know what other relevant stats could be used here. * 111 merged pull requests * 805 commits (skipping merge commits) * 10 commit authors (filtering duplicates) * Devices: 10 - 16 * Modules: 39 - 56 (Nix files in modules/) And here's what cloc reveals: [nix-shell:~/.../mobile-nixos/2019]$ cloc . 274 text files. 263 unique files. 36 files ignored. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Language files blank comment code -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- diff 55 741 2623 16308 Nix 108 719 772 4311 SVG 7 4 4 2950 LESS 24 263 333 1257 Ruby 16 147 85 706 AsciiDoc 7 130 3 243 XML 5 19 12 160 ERB 8 4 0 89 Markdown 4 43 0 85 Lua 1 15 41 58 Bourne Again Shell 2 9 10 21 C/C++ Header 1 13 35 21 C 1 1 0 17 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SUM: 239 2108 3918 26226 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [nix-shell:~/.../mobile-nixos/2020]$ cloc . 482 text files. 463 unique files. 54 files ignored. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Language files blank comment code -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- diff 89 1429 5081 22047 Nix 170 1266 1149 7576 Ruby 76 690 575 4132 SVG 10 4 4 3538 LESS 25 291 334 1413 JSON 6 0 0 959 AsciiDoc 25 396 3 844 XML 5 19 12 160 Markdown 8 88 0 159 ERB 10 23 0 130 Lua 1 15 41 58 YAML 1 1 0 40 C 1 11 5 37 C/C++ Header 1 13 35 21 Bourne Again Shell 1 2 0 4 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SUM: 429 4248 7239 41118 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stage-1 improvements This is where almost all of the work time this year was spent. Work started in January. Continuing through February, with the graphical interface. Further work punctuated the year. Neither words, screen captures or video can properly convey the amount of work spent on producing the best stage-1 experience that works across this wide range of devices. We went from a rigid shell-script based approach, to a list of tasks handled through dependency resolution. Additionally, before February, there was no way to select a previous generation. With the added GUI, generation selection is possible, error reporting in early boot is verbose, and boot progress is shown graphically. Builds on Hydra Before March 2020, no pre-built artifacts were produced. This is quite obvious when you try to build artifacts from the January checkout. More important than build artifacts, this gave us continuous delivery of builds. With this we can track regressions, both in Mobile NixOS proper, or from changes in Nixpkgs. Device support Introduced in March 2020 the Pinephone is one of those devices with the biggest mind share in the community. Though, I personally don't think it is the most interesting. After all, it is a somewhat boring device (in all the right ways!). Things with the Pinephone are expected to just work, and they mostly do, once the time is invested in implementing them. Personally, at the top of the list of surprises are the Asus Zenfone Max Plus (M1) and the Moto E6. While less of the hardware is working, they are personally notable for me because they both do not have any alternative operating available. They were acquired as a challenge for me, to work strictly with sources from the vendor. This proved to myself that, yes, it is possible to work with devices that does not have a strong community behind them. Closing word I'm excited to continue working on this project. Let's see what we can make out of 2021. Don't forget you can keep tabs on the project either by coming to the website regularly, or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed! December 2020 round-up January 5th 2021 This update is the thirteenth in a series of regular updates on the state of the project. Only changes that have been accepted and merged in Mobile NixOS are chronicled here. There's always more work currently in-progress. Notable changes During the month 12 pull requests were merged. Some interesting improvements landed, let's dive in. stage-0: boot in generation kernel+initrd One of the biggest flaw with the approach Mobile NixOS takes with the boot flow is that it completely ignores the system generation's kernel and stage-1 image. In turn, this reduces some of the benefits from NixOS, by reducing the coherency of the running system; the kernel and stage-1 are managed out of band. With the changes from #262, devices can opt-in to a stage-0 scheme. A stage-0 image is the same as a stage-1 image, except that it will use kexec to boot into the generation's kernel and stage-1 image. Devices, and their kernels, need to support kexec. This is not a given for vendor kernels. At the time being, none of the Android-based devices (all using the vendor kernels) can use this feature. On the bright side, the Pinephone has been verified to work well. Additionally, UEFI x86_64 based devices, too, can use the stage-0 scheme. Device-specific changes pine64-pinephone: Crust firmware support With the addition of the or1k toolchain to Nixpkgs, @noneucat was able to finish the pull request adding Crust support to the Pinephone . Details about Crust can be found on their project page. To use U-Boot with Crust, you will need to build it, then install it manually on your boot media. (A helper to upgrade the firmware is planned for the future.) Not related to Crust, the usual kernel upgrade for the Pinephone has been made. Introduction of uefi-x86_64 The introduction of the Generic UEFI build (x86_64) "device" may seem odd. It is meant to be used on a standard computer. But a standard computer is not a mobile device. Really, this is a dogfooding measure. With this change, it is now possible for me to replace the usual NixOS stage-1 from my personal machines, ensuring I take the stability of Mobile NixOS seriously! Additionally, this should allow supporting some x86_64 Windows-based tablets with the Mobile NixOS toolchain. While not required, the touchscreen-first boot flow will be helpful for those without a keyboard. These changes also help exercising the foundations, by creating a new system type. Removal of qemu-x86_64 As part of the changes for #253, the qemu-x86_64 device has been removed. Instead, a more generic device has been added, which by default builds images that can boot on standard UEFI, and which in turn provide the build.vm output to boot that generic UEFI image with QEMU, using Tianocore. Ports Two new devices were merged in December, one was removed. * Generic UEFI build (x86_64) (uefi-x86_64) [@samueldr] (#253) * Motorola Moto E6 (motorola-surfna) [@samueldr] (#263) Bringing the total of devices to 16. November 2020 round-up December 1st 2020 This update is the twelfth in a series of regular updates on the state of the project. Only changes that have been accepted and merged in Mobile NixOS are chronicled here. There's always more work currently in-progress. Notable changes During the month 13 pull requests were merged. Some major improvements landed, let's take a peek. Progress in stage-1 The boot splash utility now shows the progress of the boot. This is done with a simple progress bar shows how much of the tasks have been handled. Long-running tasks can provide a message to show so the user knows things aren't necessarily hung. Speaking of hung tasks. Our init now detects when no tasks resolved in a given amount of time. When this happens, the boot is being failed with, hopefully enough context in the error message to help the user. Speaking of error messages. Error messages are now less of a dead-end for our users. The interface has been reviewed to put the text message front and center. Previously we were showing a big image because we didn't even have text rendering at this state. Now that we do, let's use it. In addition to that, the error applet is now somewhat interactive. There is now a cancellable countdown; when the time is elapsed the kernel is crashed, which allows the platform to do its default action (generally reboot). When canceled, the user can select different options, either through the touch screen, using a mouse, a keyboard or using volume-keys navigation. The user can select to power off their device, which default action (so mashing the power key will power off the device). Depending on whether the platform supports it, the usual different reboot options are given. Encrypted root filesystem support Thought we were done with stage-1 updates? No! What if it was now able to decrypt LUKS encrypted filesystems? Well it can! For now, this is mainly the plumbing to make it all work. Getting a LUKS encrypted filesystem on your device is left as an exercise to the reader. Our stage-1 can now ask for a passphrase during the early boot process phases. This is done through an on-screen keyboard. For the time being the keyboard is hard-coded to be the US QWERTY layout, and this is bad. Further improvements are planned, but out of scope for releasing the feature. The on-screen keyboard will be necessary for other upcoming planned features. While using an on-screen keyboard is useful when you don't have a physical keyboard, physical keyboards also can be used with that interface. Similarly to the previous note, it is hardcoded to be the US QWERTY keyboard, but the tooling chosen to drive the keyboard mapping (libxkbcommon) will give us the ability to configure both the on-screen and physical keyboard. Ports No new ports were made in November. There is still a total of 15 devices you can build for. October 2020 round-up November 3rd 2020 This update is the eleventh in a series of regular updates on the state of the project. Only changes that have been accepted and merged in Mobile NixOS are chronicled here. There's always more work currently in-progress. Notable changes During the month 14 pull requests were merged. Some interesting changes were made during the month, let's look at some of them. Re-done kernel builder ergonomics The goal of this change is to make the kernel derivations as lean as possible, relying on the builder, rather than relying on copy-pasting common patterns around. This is a change that was needed since the project was started. Though, it could not have happened much earlier than this late in the project. This is because multiple different quirky kernels needed to exist to properly show what needed to be abstracted. With this, all common patterns for quirks have been identified and put behind flags. Those flags are described in Notes about the kernel builder. End-users shouldn't see any difference, this will help people who make ports. Compile kernels only once While testing the previous change, it was observed by @danielfullmer that kernel compilation happened twice for some devices. This was not a regression. Though looking at things trying to find problems you are bound to see the existing flaws! This was worked around by doing everything in one make invocation. The end-result is that some kernel builds will finish twice as quickly! Pinephone Modem support improvements Simply put, the modem has been verified to work with LTE data. With that said, there's more to it. End-users shouldn't have to care about a deeply-rooted /sys fs path to turn the modem off or on. This is why the modem-control service has been added. It mirrors the modem's state using bindsTo and wantedBy. With this service, the modem is better integrated with systemd, but more importantly the user can stop and start it using systemctl, rather than to dig for a particular less user-friendly path. Calls and SMS will be tested at a later point in time. Though it is expected that calls will require some work for the audio to work properly (a known upstream issue). Other notable changes * #228 Boot GUI: only show relevant reboot options * #215 Provide autoport in the default shell New ports One new device was merged this time. * Razer Phone 2 (razer-cheryl2) [@samueldr] (#223) Bringing the total of devices to 15. August and September 2020 round-up October 6th 2020 This update is the tenth in a series of regular updates on the state of the project. Only changes that have been accepted and merged in Mobile NixOS are chronicled here. There's always more work currently in-progress. Notable changes As with the last update, a big part of the 10 pull requests merged were bug fixes or minor changes. Here's a quick look at some of the nicer things achieved. Forced kernel configuration normalization The kernel-builder infrastructure now forces the configuration file used in its build to be normalized. What is normalization? Simply put, it's about updating the kernel configuration file so all of the options represent the values set in the current kernel build. This is a somewhat breaking change, as it forces kernel configurations to be kept up to date even if no changes were made by the maintainer. Though this makes the final build somewhat more declarative, as options removed and new options will be reflected in the kernel configuration in the repository. Autoporter The new Mobile NixOS Autoporter project is an experimental tooling intended to expedite the first step in porting to a new device. In a few words, it finds as many facts about a given device as it can. The current implementation uses pre-expanded factory images from OEM, but plans are in the work to work from files the user provide instead or in addition of. This enables the porter-developer to start from known true values for the device, rather than needing them to find out those values. The more valuable ones are the subtle ones, like the USB gadget modes, or system as root. It does not provide a complete skeleton yet. Mainly for now it's missing the kernel derivation. Though we might be able to provide likely source locations depending on some factors. All of this is not theoretical. We already have one port done through following this process! Look at the pull request #205 where the commits also tries to show the work that was needed to go from the skeleton files to a working port. Note that this port was made easier by the presence of another Snapdragon 660 port existing. Many quirks end up working similarly between devices on the same base platform. Hopefully this will help some of you take the plunge into trying to make a new port! Though note that this does not replace the still non-existent documentation about porting guidelines. It might still not be trivial. Other notable changes * #193 pine64-pinephone-braveheart: August 2020 updates Making motorola-addison much more usable: * #195 initrd: Make compression method an option * #196 motorola-addison: Build firmware and enable wcnss New ports One new device was merged this time. * Sony Xperia XA2 (sony-pioneer) [@samueldr] (#205) Bringing the total of devices to 14. Closing words The last month's update was skipped due to the lower amount of work being complete, the main contributor (me, samueldr) was tied-up working on implementing the NixOS.org redesign. Fear not, it's not lack of motivation, but temporary engagements that slowed things down. For the time being this project is still my main focus, and I hope it can stay for longer. July 2020 round-up August 4th 2020 This update is the ninth in a series of regular updates on the state of the project. Only changes that have been accepted and merged in Mobile NixOS are chronicled here. There's always more work currently in-progress. Notable changes As with last month, a big part of the 10 pull requests merged were bug fixes or minor changes. Though some valuable work was also finished. Asus Zenfone Max Plus (M1) The port for asus-x018d is mainly notable for being the only alternative system to the OEM-provided Android system, with the exception to a TWRP that is using the OEM-built kernel. This means that, for the first time, Mobile NixOS this is the only alternative system for a device, including other Android-based systems. Finishing with a last note, this device has an older Mediatek SoC, compared to the other ported Mediatek device. There is not much to say, except that it was found that older Mediatek devices may exhibit a similar quirk to Qualcomm devices, where the framebuffer has to be refreshed explicitly for the display to be updated. External device definitions I hesitate to openly discuss about this pull request, as it might make contributors think they should not contribute their devices back. #162 adds a mechanism to maintain and build external device definitions. These external definitions should only be used for devices that are not welcome to the main project. The main reason a device would not be welcome is if it is not a "Mobile device". An example of such a device is the Pinebook Pro, which is a laptop. Another example would be porting to SBCs like a Raspberry Pi. Updates for the boot GUI This change, #189, is where most if this month's development time was spent. The toolkit used for the boot GUI has been forked and adapted to serve the goal of providing a GUI for mobile devices better. As part of the changes, some minor UX (User eXperience) changes have been made, but more importantly, major changes like properly supporting mouse and touch screens in an independent manner, and providing keyboard-driven input. This also adds support to navigate the GUI with the volume keys and the power button, which is a common scheme used to provide a fall-back navigation when touchscreen support is possible. Except for the new way added to interact with the GUI, there are no major changes to how the GUI is used. Though the work is a first step to provide more in-depth options during the boot process, like tracking progress, and required user input for actions during boot like passphrase input. New ports One new device was merged this month. * Asus Zenfone Max Plus (M1) (asus-x018d) [@samueldr] (#175) Bringing the total of devices to 13. June 2020 round-up July 7th 2020 This update is the eighth in a series of regular updates on the state of the project. Only changes that have been accepted and merged in Mobile NixOS are chronicled here. There's always more work currently in-progress. Notable changes Most of the 9 pull requests merged were trivial or minor changes. Though there's still some notable changes. Pinephone bluetooth support It turns out all it needed was a trivial fix. Giving it the firmware it wanted adds proper support for bluetooth on the Pinephone. If you are using the examples/demo rootfs, its configuration does not currently configure the system for audio with bluetooth. The instructions to configure audio for bluetooth are the same as usual, as Mobile NixOS is composed on top of NixOS. Redmi Note 8 Pro The port for xiaomi-begonia is mainly notable for being the first port for a Mediatek SoC. I am singling out this port as a proof that the breadth-first development style is working well. Since Mobile NixOS had many abstractions needed for the existing different platforms, this new platform, and device, was ported without a sweat. This also paves the way for other Mediatek ports by providing a working example. Coupled with #175, another, older, Mediatek device (merged in early July), there is enough material to give clues for future ports by community members. New ports One new device was merged this month. * Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro (xiaomi-begonia) [@samueldr] (#171) Bringing the total of devices to 12. Continue to the News archive page to read older articles. * * Page Source * Edit * Site Map