Install FreeBSD on a Smartphone

[kpedersen]

PostmarketOS uses Alpine Linux, it needs specific devices exactly because of that: needs to support a mainline kernel to work properly.

In the early days PostmarketOS just ran Alpine in a chroot ontop of Android and whatever kernel it had. Does it not still just do that?

 

[menelkir]

In the early days PostmarketOS just ran Alpine in a chroot ontop of Android and whatever kernel it had. Does it not still just do that?

Nah, chroot ontop of android is only used as contraption for totally wonked devices. The idea was always to run under mainline kernel, that's why only a handful of devices are fully supported. And isn't their fault.

 

[lm2lm2]

I think you potentially(?) misunderstood. PostmarketOS only supports a fraction of device models.

Wrong : a "fraction" means just few, less than ten.
Just have a look on their wiki to understand they really support over thousand devices, at least for voice/sms and lot of others activities.
i have a pmos on my daily life, it does perfectly :
-cellular communications (phone, sms, mms..)
-internet communications (xmpp, matrix, voip, emails)
-internet additional tools (rss, web with firefox, dillo..)
-lot of cmd-based tools (wireguard, rclone, etc..)

it works without problems, even on samsung or others brands-based devices.

Are you sure? PostmarketOS traditionally just used the Android kernel and created a semi-general purpose Linux environment in a chroot. What does your uname -a say?

LoL.
Postmarketos aims to be completely android-things independent.
it's just an alpine installation on a electronic board.
it have no links, nothing to do with android, and that's exactly the purpose of that thing.

however, i guess lot of bsd users wouldn't be mad if a sort of "bsd-based" (independent of apple systems) would arrive to smartphones, as eg this thread :

Let's start a new project : let's create a new mobile device powered by FreeBSD.

Hello Freebsd-Lovers. I plan to buy the "PINEPHONE – Beta Edition with Convergence Package Linux SmartPhone". I would like to install FreeBSD instead of Linux on this device. I would like to create a team of developers. I can help those developers,but not deeply,because I'm a system...

forums.freebsd.org

i think lot of bsd passionate regrets this thread is locked..

 

[kpedersen]

Wrong : a "fraction" means just few, less than ten.

No it doesn't. A fraction is relative.

Lets say there are only 100 android phones currently on the market; a fraction could be ~5 that support postmarketOS which sounds about right. A fraction of stars in our galaxy would be considerably more than 10.

support over thousand devices

The phones listed on the website is a small fraction of the wider market. For a start, many devices don't even have an open(able) bootloader. But I don't think it matters too much if we disagree on that.

Many of these devices listed further down this page (1000 is generous!) do tend to look incomplete. So I guess "level of supported" is also relative. It might end up with the NetBSD "phenomenon" where yes it runs on everything, but almost every bit of connected hardware is lacking a driver.

Even GNU Hurd supports vastly more Intel systems than this.

Postmarketos aims to be completely android-things independent.

Yes and that is a (noble!) pipe dream. For everything else there is this:

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Using_prebuilt_kernels

i think lot of bsd passionate regrets this thread is locked..

You would assume that on a forum dedicated to FreeBSD everyone here is passionate about BSD right? If not, perhaps they are in the wrong place? And no, we don't tend to lock threads just because FreeBSD isn't commonly used for a specific niche.

however, i guess lot of bsd users wouldn't be mad if a sort of "bsd-based" (independent of apple systems) would arrive to smartphones, as eg this thread :

Certainly not. It would be great; I have drawers filled with these darn things! Though I think expectations need to be set. I don't believe Linux is there yet and even that has had many hundreds of man years comitted to the effort in comparison.

 

[kpedersen]

Slightly aside so I made a separate post. For one of my random phones (Honor 8), the wiki here:

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Huawei_Honor_8_(huawei-frd)

States:

The Huawei Honor 8 has been updated to Android 8 in some regions, while others are stuck on Android 7.0.

Android 8 uses a different partition layout and kernel.

This port is based on Android 7.0 kernel and probably won't work on devices updated to Android 8.

If you have a device that got the Android 8 update you might need to make a port based on the Android 8 kernel. Take a look at huawei-warsaw for information on dealing with the Android 8 partition layout.

Why would it matter what version of the Android kernel the phone has if postmarketOS replaces it all anyway?

It all sounds a bit "ricy" to me. Impressive hacking work, but "ricy" nontheless.

 

[menelkir]

Why would it matter what version of the Android kernel the phone has if postmarketOS replaces it all anyway?

Because google itself is ricy, and manufacturers doesn't give a damn either. So you end up with something like a PC you can't change the bootloader and doesn't have source for essential drivers most of the time. And that's exactly what you pointed out, the partition scheme can be reused as a workaround if the kernel is vendor-locked but you can't change because eh, you don't have access to the essential extras of the kernel to change that.

 

[tingo]

Why would it matter what version of the Android kernel the phone has if postmarketOS replaces it all anyway?

Because an Android device (specifically one with a cell phone modem) contains more than Android in it's flash storage; there is the firmware for the cell modem / baseband, and other stuff. These parts are needed to make the phone work. Unfortunately, not only the location in flash storage changes, but often the api / firmware interface changes too between major Android versions. This firmware is not distributed outside the Android image, so postmarketOS (or others) can not legally distribute this, if they could find a way to extract it from an Android upgrade image.