Re: Debian on android Kernel with android driver use
Thank you for your helpful answers! I will comment on them a bit:
libhybris is only useful for proprietary drivers that cannot be
recompiled. Most of the proprietary drivers also can't be distributed
in non-free so I'm not sure how much sense packaging it makes.
Yes, most drivers for Android smartphones aren't open-source, but I thought
of taking them from LineageOS or Cyanogenmod, they redistribute them too,
right?
These would not be accepted into the Debian archive but you could have
a script for downloading/installing them. The Android kernels could be
packaged outside of Debian (or just downloaded from an Android
distro). The parts of the rootfs that are Free Software could be
packaged by the Android Tools team. They have already packaged the adb
daemon for example.
Maybe just a script which downloads the sources (and binary blobs) and
builds them as debian package with debian adaptions downloaded from another
place, maybe like OpenElec does whith their build script for Raspberry Pi
and others.
This needs to be merged into the Debian version of Linux before Debian
can properly support your device. First step would be to find the
source code for the Android version of Linux that is used on your
device. If the code isn't public you may need to get SFC or
gpl-violations.org involved. Second step is to rebase that tree onto
linux-next, rewrite the bad parts and try to upstream the code.
The Kernel code for (at least) my phone is available directly from the
manufacturer (BQ) on github, but I guess rebasing the code is more work
than just playing around with git, right?
At least for prototyping, testing and the start, you could download the
original code, apply the gnulinux_support patch and compile it in the build
script which is also used for the android chroot rootfs. The android things
could be just taken out of a open-source android distro (but they would
probably still contain blobs), which should be better than extracting the
binary firmware from the device. The work of putting the android parts in
the image could be also done by the script (or makefiles).
I would encourage you to join the Debian Qt/KDE team and talk to them
about packaging this. You may also want to talk to the upstream Plasma
Mobile team, IIRC they have Ubuntu based images and might want to join
the packaging for Debian.
I already spoke to the Plasma Mobile team longer, and they already have
ubuntu packages, which would needed to be cleaned up and adapted to debian
(just change a few dependency names). BTW they don't use ubuntu touch
anymore, because canonicals support and updates were awfull. Thank you for
the hint to talk to the Debian Qt/KDE team, I will at least talk to them
and maybe the packaging could be done as a team by the plasma-mobile team
(that packages their things at least for ubuntu anyway).
It seems like a fairly good workaround for a crappy situation.
Workarounds aren't going to improve the situation though.
I am glad to have heard that the kernel already has mainline support for
the Nexus 5 (hammerhead), if they continue their work, this workaround will
not be needed in the future. There is also work on open source adreno GPU
kernel drivers, which would add the ability to use other kernels than the
one the phone brought with it.
I hope at least something can be done, if it's only packaging the phone gui
in debian, that would be something.
JBBgameich
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