Help: A lot via the Mobian Ports ( #mobian-ports:matrix.org ) Matrix room and the postmarketOS offtopic ( #offtopic:postmarketos.org ) Matrix room.
Sources: Not much there yet. As soon as there are official builds for the Pixel 3a, I will start writing docs. I already have a lot of notes on what I had to do. But first I need to have someone merge the Kernel patches, as I don’t know C, which makes resolving merge conflicts really hard, it turns out. Once that is done, there are just a few smaller merge requests left and builds will appear magically.
The whole process is not that difficult if there are already Kernel patches available. In the case of the Pixel 3a, I only had to clone the sdm670-mainline repo ( gitlab.com/sdm670-mainline/linux-patches ) , compile the kernel (two commands) and get a .deb, which I used with mobian-recipes ( salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/mobian-recipes/ ) to build an image. I then wrote a config file for droid-juicer ( gitlab.com/mobian1/droid-juicer/-/…/4 ) which tells it what files on the vendor and modem partitions it should get, then those are copied to /usr/lib/firmware/updates/.
That was easy as dmesg will just tell you what files it cannot load because they are missing. Just find those, write the config, run droid-juicer, reboot… boom. Display, Wifi, LTE and so on working.
Then smaller stuff like udev rules for vibration and an initramfs hook ( salsa.debian.org/…/qcom-firmware?ref_type=heads ) so that firmware files get integrated into initramfs and components start to work early during boot.
The most difficult part would be merging the Kernel patches with other patches and resoving the merge conflicts… At least to me, as I don’t know C.
If there are no mainlining efforts for a phone yet, then I don’t know what to do, as that requires a Kernel dev.
That’s all not that hard, my main difficulty was finding out what to do. Everything I did so far would be an afternoon of work, if I had just found the necessary information much quicker. Instead I spent two weeks, of which 95 % was finding info, lol.
Just join the Mobian Matrix room, we should be able to help you, even though I know far less than the others there…so far. :p
I do hope that’s helpful and I’ll happily try to answer more questions. :)
You could join the Mobian Matrix room or the PostmarketOS room I have mentioned in another post on this thread (or whatever the right term is… Comment on a post? Sub-post?). I did not know anything about porting two weeks ago, but asking dumb questions helps learning.
Got Mobian (almost) ported to Pixel 3a / 3a XL (lemmy.sdf.org)
Most parts work, still not sure why Bluetooth gives me errors in dmesg, audio out works, microphone input not yet… I’m getting there....