💾 Archived View for ebc.li › ulogs › 2020-08-08.gmi captured on 2022-01-08 at 13:51:27. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

µLog #1

2020-08-08

Porting postmarketOS to my ZTE Axon 7

So, I got bored and decided to try something new, and ported postmarketOS to my old phone.

Getting the kernel to compile was the easy part, as I tried this a month prior, and knew the trivial fixes.

Trying to boot the kernel was the actual challenge. The LineageOS 15 kernel I used had some issues with the LCD driver which required some cherry-picks from an unofficial LineageOS 17 kernel, and a weird kernel panic that caused me to downgrade to GCC 6, but after all that, I got a USB connection in the initramfs.

I got into the initramfs, but I couldn't progress further, because the boot system couldn't find the sub-partitions that contained the rest of the system.

This was the issue that stumped me the most, but later I found out that I needed to read the documentation a little harder, and fixed some values with the generated file system's partition table, and it just worked!

Also, before fixing the partitions, I tried flashing a microSD card to see if the initramfs could read it instead, and it did.

I am hoping I can switch to the (close to) mainline kernel for this phone's SoC, but that's for another day, as currently I can't get any useful debugging information out of it.

My pmaports zte-axon7 branch

µLog?????

I am also trying another experiment with these "micro-logs", where I just write about what's happened every interesting day (so, barely never). Let's see how long I keep this up before stopping entirely.

🐺 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · me@ecmelberk.com