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finding drivers for the official google phones? with about 12 years of kernel support, officially from google?

https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/kernel/andro...

not a problem at all. now your samsung or some unknown brand, who knows. I'm sure your 12 year old iphone got the latest and current bluetooth driver though.

not everyone around me is stupid. just the guy being purposely dense. you.



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    *> it does use android drivers*
...Wait a minute, that sounds like something I can do, too!

I'm a LFS[0] kind of guy. I'm also just as opposed to proprietary driver blobs as the next guy...

But, for the purpose of getting more use out of my existing phone... I guess I can just root the thing and copy some kernel modules off, eh? Nice.

0: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/


This post is pure whitewash bullshit.

"omitted downloading some kernel modules for the hardware"

aka all the drivers, the actual things that make the hardware work, which are all closed source, and eventually will stop being updated (likely about 6 months from now) leaving you on a forever obsolete android release and kernel, full of exploitable holes.


The bigger question, to me, is what drivers are included. Many of the chips in all these phones do not have specifications freely available or community-built drivers. Does this include, say, the GPU driver? Or is that still a binary blob that has to be (usually illegally) copied from the device's built-in software?

https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-touch/blob/master/README.m...

The devices supported are quite old. What are the blockers for a recent phone? Are bootloaders not unlockable? Are drivers not available?

Supported Devices:

Devices device: arale: This issue affects the Meizu MX 4.

device: bacon: This issue affects the Oneplus One.

device: cooler: This issue affects the Bq M10 HD tablet

device: deb: This issue affects the Nexus 7 2013 LTE.

device: flo: This issue affects the Nexus 7 2013 Wi-Fi.

device: FP2: This issue affects the Fairphone 2

device: frieza: This issue affects the Bq M10 FHD tablet.

device: hammerhead: This issue affects the Nexus 5.

device: krillin: This issue affects the Bq E4.5.

device: mako: This issue affects the Nexus 4.

device: manta: This issue affects the Nexus 10 tablet

device: turbo: This issue affects the Meizu Pro 5.

device: vegetahd: This issue affects the Bq E5.

device: w7: This issue affects the LG L90.


You can install a plain AOSP and have (almost[1]) full control over your phone though.

[1] almost, because every smartphone needs proprietary drivers to run …


Do they really support those devices? or do you still have to install binary blobs (pried from Google/OEM images) for the kernel and/or drivers to have even basic things like touchscreen, radio, etc working?

That generally works fine, especially for the same Android version. However, as Android evolves, so do the driver requirements. Yesterday’s driver may simply not work with today’s Android. Only the driver supplier (typically the likes of Qualcomm) could realistically create an updated driver. Otherwise, extensive reverse engineering would be required.

So would you please help me to find an ROM with an up-to-date Android Common Kernel for my i9300 Samsung Galaxy S3?

AFAIK, the only way to run it with working drivers for all hardware components, are ROMs which use the rusty 3.0.101 Linux kernel from back in the day and I think that is what DCKing is referring to. If you want to create a new ROM, you either have to use the old kernel and have an upper Limit of Android 7.x (in this case) or you have to accept, that not all components are supported (e.g. no GPS).

I would be glad if the situation would be different. Maybe it is different for phones you buy today?


Probably Google... just look at the new Android V12

I suppose the obvious answer here is cyanogenmod.

Reddit /r/Android discussion here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ht1il/nice_move_sam...

Apparently this is the first Android phone to ship with 100% open source kernel (drivers and all).


OP's question is probably targeting the mid to low end devices, and not an officially supported Google manufactured device. For example, none of my phones (past & present) have ever been supported by any serious rom streams (not counting xda)

Galaxy Nexus isn't supported? Got a source on that? If so, that's really disappointing :\.

postmarketOS provides tooling, documentation and a helpful community ... at some point, you'll need to put in the work, or sell your used devices and buy other, better supported used devices to work around this.

Is it really unfortunate that there's no (known) mainline/close to mainline touchscreen driver for the Pixel 4a? Absolutely. But it won't magically appear without somebody putting in the necessary effort.


Yeah, it's fairly simple to compile the Android source. Plenty of tutorials out there on XDA, Rootzwiki and from Google themselves.

Basically, one just has to grab the drivers you mentioned above and pull the source using repo/git and compile using Linux (Debian/Debian forks are the easiest generally to do it with) or OSX.

I compiled the source the day after it came out for Android 4.1 for my Verizon Galaxy Nexus. Ran it all the way up until yesterday when I switched to Cyanogenmod 10.

I'm an admin (yarly) at Rootzwiki, so if anyone has questions on how to build the source or mod it, you can head over there and post questions in the development forum. There's usually a few of us that reply in our free time.


Right now you can get vanilla Android on most recent devices, same image for all of them thanks for the Treble project, that separated kernel and hardware drivers from Android system.

https://github.com/phhusson/treble_experimentations


AOSP doesn't include drivers so you meant to say stock Android builds.

Are you familiar with Cyanogenmod? http://www.cyanogenmod.org/

Can you provide a phone with an updated kernel? I have yet to see one on XDA and am really curious
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