See also 
SODP News on Telegram.
As promised, the SoMainline team made an appearance at the OpenAlt conference, giving a great presentation on our progress for getting mainline kernels running on our devices, contributing back to the upstream Linux Kernel and other exciting topics.
You're very welcome to watch a recording of the presentation "SoMainline: Rowing into upstream" on YouTube.
We even got a retweet on Twitter for the announcement from noted open-source trailblazer Collabora!
It seems like we nearly forgot about this news feed…
So what has happened during the time?
The pdx213 device (Xperia 10 III) has been added to Open Devices, though it is still WIP so bugs are to be expected.
Now for some unfortunate news: MSM8998 devices (meaning Yoshino platform) have been dropped from Open Devices.
As we try to do each year we have once again booted up the newest Android version (Android 12, codenamed "S") in 3 days since public release. It should be noted that while it boots up we do not have Android 12 blobs, so a lot of things will not work as expected. As such, it is not yet recommended to use on your daily driver.
As for SoMainline news: We are still here. Still working hard. We have added many devices to mainline. Some of which include pdx201, 203, 213 and some others.
And as with last year, we once again will present at the OpenAlt conference. So keep an eye out for that.
It is possible that we might have missed something, so keep an eye out on Open Devices GitHub.
A whole lot of new builds and a few new devices have been added to the Builds page of the community site as well.
Reminder: In case you are interested in developing or want to know more about a particular subject, have a look the the Resources page, which contains links to lots of useful guides and other sites.
Well, hello again!
Today, we are excited to share news about Ubuntu Touch, 4.19 progress and Mainline efforts.
After great work by Konrad, Sjllls and others, there are now 4 devices on an SODP base available for Ubuntu Touch:
The X Compact and XZ were also added to UBTouch's great installer (after fixing a nasty bug).
As you might have surmised from the latest activity on the sonyxperiadev GitHub account, edo devices are making steady progress on Kernel 4.19 and are now booting(-ish).
Mainline efforts are going stronger than ever. The linux-arm-msm mailing list is saturated with patches sent in by Konrad et al. and we are positive that a lot of them will get accepted.
Finally, we'd like to introduce a growing resource for kernel developers: The SoMainline Documentation, where we document hardware facts, build and porting guides and anything else we come across regarding mainlining.
Happy Hacking!
Hi there!
The beautiful Xperia 1 II and Xperia 5 II devices got released with the 4.19 Kernel. So it is only fitting that, Open Devices is working on bringing up a 4.19 Kernel for the "edo" platform.
You can view progress on the LA.UM.9.12.r1 branch for:
Note: This is only preliminary work, not a fully working bringup yet.
Work on kernel 4.14 is not stopping anytime soon - Pablo is working hard on applying the latest LTS patches.
Remember the news about mainline kernel support? There's more to share!
Angelo sent out over 40 patches from (mainly) himself, Konrad and Martin to the Linux mailing lists and was noticed by Michael of Phoronix!
See the article "Independent Developers Tackling Snapdragon 630/660 SoC Support For The Upstream Linux Kernel - Phoronix"
We see this as a great opportunity to spread the word about mainlining our phones, so that they can give the user a sense of security and the freedom of choice when it comes to the OS!
Good news for Yoshino:
Angelo is glad to announce that the kernel panics due to modem crashes on Yoshino have been solved. Now, in the event of a modem crash on this platform, the subsystems will cleanly get stopped and restarted in the blink of an eye, automatically restoring functionality of the phone subsystem and won't cause any unexpected system reboots any more.
We're introducing new exFAT userland utilities which should give about a 10x speedup and stop running out of memory.
See local_manifests: external: move exfat support tooling from relan to exfatprogs.
📌 Heads up:
We're following LineageOS branching practices now and using q-mr1 as the default Android Q branch for repositories.
master will be for AOSP master/Android R from now on.
Please update your references and open pull requests against q-mr1 from now on!
Hopefully this transition wasn't too confusing for you.
It will help us to freeze branches when we switch over to Android R/11, which will receive r-mr1, S s-mr1 and so on.
Do you like the sound of the word "mainline"?
So do we at the Open Devices team.
Konrad did some amazing work and implemented support for SDM630 in mainline, basic mainline support for Nile, and Martin joined in to create basic mainline support for Ganges.
This is just a basic level of support and will not boot into Android yet (as can be expected). But we are happy to share at least some news about these developments with you.
Be prepared though. We are eager to share more news which aren't mainline very soon.
Did you know Android contains quite a bit of code from Open Devices contributors?
The upcoming Android R release will include a few patches from two team members:
See AOSP Gerrit: Marijn and AOSP Gerrit: Felix.
Open Devices makes it possible to run the master branch for development easily.
Things are about to become even more dynamic at Open Devices:
Support for Dynamic Android Partitions (DAP) has arrived.
The oh-so-mysterious new device - platform codename Seine - is launching with dynamic partitions and fastbootd support.
Take a look at this
and this PR.
Support for booting Google-signed Generic System Images is also underway with this PR - this will enable you to boot Preview GSIs with AVB and enforcing dm-verity.
Kernel work is also steadily progressing - 4.14.183 is currently under testing, as is a PR improving stability for kumano and tama.
The entire IMS "situation" is going forward in great big strides. The SonyOpenTelephony tool now takes care of flashing the correct configuration to the modem. Further, commits to common and sepolicy continue to move us along.
Last but not least, SODP's own konradybcio is doing great work getting mainlining patches for legacy devices into Linus' Linux tree. Nice job!
Clutch, gear, gas, and off we go! Open Devices is pushing into overdrive as of late.
All tama devices have gotten a massive battery life improvement with the merging of this nifty kernel update. (QC) Charging should also be improved, as well as thermals.
As always, Open Devices is keeping up with LTS kernel releases, and the 4.14 kernel is now on the latest .184 subrevision.
Work is also underway to use the updated @2.0 GNSS HAL on 4.9 kernels.
Heads up if you're still relying on the /firmware symlink in rootfs,
you should update your code to use /vendor/firmware_mnt instead - see this PR.
Testing for this PR to change the off-mode charger functionality would be much appreciated.
Game, set, match. 😎
Buonasera,
this announcement will be Italian-flavoured, because Angelo contributed High Brightness Mode [PR1] [PR2] for kumano (X1, X5) devices.The common tree got reshuffled
a bit this week, making it neat and tidy in compliance with the move to blueprints.
Also, the dataqti and dpmd init files are now actually shipped - blimey!
Marijn carried the torch of sepolicy this week and worked on a whole lot of patches to keep up with the new IMS functionality.
The Kumano fingerprint reader should become a bit more reliable with the disabling of dynamic power control.
You might have seen the spectre of mysterious new names floating around - what's that, Seine? PDX? You'll see soon enough, but you can view the kernel release before the device is even available - sweet.
Arrivederci!
Heads up people, things are moving around a bit at the moment.
The Qualcomm HAL components have moved locations, keep an eye on local_manifests and repo_update.
You should do a fresh sync before you do a build so you can reap the benefits of the newly released ODM v7.
Do you enjoy talking to your phone? Now you too can be one of those obnoxious people, while also consuming way less battery.
Support for Sound Trigger in the device DSP has been added for the Kumano (X1, X5) and Tama (XZ2, XZ2 Compact, XZ3) in SODP.
This means you can use voice assistants like Ok Google and also possibly use voice fingerprint features.
The required graphite blobs will be released with the next SW binaries, while on the OSS side Angelo has implemented the needed changes: common, manifests, kumano platform.
If you'd like to expand support for other platforms, contributions are always welcome!
You might have noticed Android R approaching fast. While Google is busy putting the finishing touches on the new release, we too have been working behind the scenes to get the Open Devices project ready.
Patches for fwk-detect, common modules, CASH & init files have been merged or are pending.
We're also in the process of converting old Android.mk build files to the new Android.bp format, which is faster to parse and just plain nicer.
Some of our apps have been getting rewrites in Kotlin, and we have some more aces up our sleeves.
Progress!
Things are gearing up for a nice surprise in the telephony stack.
Angelo contributed a few configs for the connectivity components.
If you keep an eye on the device-sony-common master branch, you might even catch a glimpse of the new additions for the next binaries release 🤫 (subject to change).
You might already want to update the qcom-telephony repo locally to version 8.2, as seen in this pending PR.
Have fun, folks! 😁
Hey, I feel like we should introduce ourselves.
We're Paul, Martin, Marijn, Angelo and Felix, from the Open Devices team. We're not employed by Sony and this is not an official channel, but we volunteer with development because we enjoy working in this team.
We're going to be posting updates about the current development progress here. New Software Binaries releases, kernel updates, and things you should watch out for as developers and users.
For more information about the project, please visit the Open Devices Community Page.
Enjoy, and stay tuned!
Note: This is an unofficial community page about the Open Devices Project by Sony. For the official website, refer to Open Devices · Sony.com. This page is neither affiliated with nor endorsed by Sony or any of its subsidiaries.