This is a follow-up to my earlier post: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/12809764

(I re-used the photo as it was quicker and because the UI still looks the same, anyway, five months later.)

Time for an update on where I got with the Pixel 3a / 3a XL so far:

I Am Getting There.

There isn’t that much missing anymore. Will probably soon try this out as my daily driver, just did not yet have the time to configure all the applications I need. :)

This Works

• booting
• display
• touch
• modem
• plymouth
• battery/charging
• mobile data
• wifi
• torch
• suspend
• SMS (only receiving was tested, but I don’t have reason to believe sending wouldn’t work)
• vibration (udev rule needs to be added to the corresponding package)
• audio (ALSA config not packaged, but I’ll get to that…)
• Bluetooth™ (mac address has to be set after each boot, one single command, should probably package a script, still thinking about the right path)
• eSIM (supported, but needs a bit more testing)
• camera (front camera buggy, back camera works but patches not in git yet)
• GPS (needs some improvements to accuracy)

This Does Not Work (Soon)

• USB host mode
• call audio (requires packaging q6voiced to get audio from the modem, but of course VoIP would already work)
• full disk encryption (no installer images yet, once the other stuff is done this will magically be there)

This Has An Unknown Status

• Fingerprint Sensor
• NFC (no idea what software I could use for testing, but should work, does so on pmOS)

This Is Missing And Will Come Later

• accelerometer
• magnetometer
• ambient light sensor
• barometer

The Main Issues That Prevail

• A systemd unit with a hard-coded value, that has to be manually edited for now
• ALSA config not yet packaged, has to be manually copied for now
• few things to do for kernel packaging and then submitting that to Mobian
• no call audio yet, as the daemon (q6voiced) is not yet packaged, but can be manually added for now (I’m considering just using VoIP until I can get to that :D)
• simple script that brings up Bluetooth has to be added somewhere

Other than that, I cannot think of anything else that would be missing.

The Sources (Use The Source, Luke)

• My efforts of packaging a device-specific kernel: https://salsa.debian.org/erebion/sdm-670-linux (which will be used until all patches are part of upstream Linux and we can finally use a regular mainline kernel)
• mobian-recipes, which is used to build images: https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/mobian-recipes
• droid-juicer, which retrieves some important files from some partitions: https://gitlab.com/mobian1/droid-juicer
• https://wiki.postmarketos.org (lovely folks, thanks for sharing everything you found out the hard way :D)

Thanks For All The Fish

Huge thanks to be sdm670-linux project and flamingradian who runs the project (just one person!) to make sure the Kernel works on those devices! :)

I don’t know how Kernel development works, so I would have never started porting without this project.

Find that here: https://gitlab.com/sdm670-mainline/linux

Questions Accepted / Ask Me Anything About The Project

I will gladly answer all questions, I hope that more people will start porting if it becomes clear that this is not arcane magic. It’s mostly just arcane. And a community of friendly people that try to be helpful.#