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Re: Debian mobile BoF at DebConf17



Would using Halium be something you would be interested in? To give an overview how it works, it's comparable to how SailfishOS runs on android hardware. So it basically consists of the following parts, which wouldn't need to be packaged though. Kernels and Android parts would be provided by the Halium Team.

- Linux kernel (from lineageos or aosp)

- systemd (from the distribution, in this case debian)

- a few halium systemd services to start / stop the android container.

- the android container running in LXC

- libhybris to talk with the android stuff


I know it's a difficult discussion, but Halium would provide drivers for sensors, graphic wifi by using android drivers.

The alternative to that is rewriting anything, but as you now this is not realistic to support multiple devices in a shorter time.

Extra packages which could be, but wouldn't needed to be packaged in Debian are:

- libhybris

- the systemd services

All other parts would be fetched from halium repos while building. The current tested rootfs in Halium is ubuntu xenial, but there is not so much difference to Debian. But some required packages are missing:

- adbd (heard it is not tested and maintained in debian)

Note that Halium is a new project, and it's still WIP. But if you would be interested in using and developing with it, that would help a lot.

If you could imagine using Halium, it would be nice to add it to the wiki page under "Hardware that is not supported by mainline kernel".


We could use the same rootfs for Halium and mainline devices, for the Halium devices, I would just chroot in and install a few extra packages while building.

I already started changing the Ubuntu live-build script to create a Debian stretch rootfs, but it would need further improvements and some packages not available in Debian yet. My problem currently is I don't have a server to host my aptly repository.

I'm not that experienced in using live-build, but my work so far is available on http://github.com/JBBgameich/rootfs-builder, branch debian.

Some resources to get more information are halium.org and the Halium chats and groups.


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