forkbomb writes words (Posts about linux)

Camera on Galaxy S3

Simon Shields — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

It's been a while since my last update, but much progress has been made: the Note 2 touchscreen will be landing in 4.16, and the actual device tree source files will be landing in 4.17 (hopefully along with support for the notification LED, if not more). But recently, I've been focusing on figuring out how to get the camera working.

kexec on Galaxy S3/Note 2

Simon Shields — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 13:00:00 GMT

So, we have a booting kernel, and a bunch of nice^{[citation needed]} dts files describing the hardware of each phone. One problem: the proprietary bootloader, "S-BOOT", has no device tree support - it just loads an Android "boot.img", consisting of a kernel, ramdisk, and some configuration. Fortunately, Linux has a mechanism to load a device tree appended to the end of the kernel image. This allows us to use a single fixed device tree, but won't let us boot a single kernel/initramfs combo on all the devices we're aiming to support. Along with this, the boot partition only allows 8MB for kernel + initramfs, which is... not that much.

So, how can we achieve one image to rule them all?

WiFi on Galaxy S3

Simon Shields — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 10:29:25 GMT

So, mainline boots! However, with only access to a console over UART, copying files to/from the S3 involves rebooting to recovery mode, plugging into USB, and pushing the file using Android's debug bridge, adb. This is... painful. Fortunately, the S3 and Note 2 include a BCM4334 for WiFi + Bluetooth functionality. For now, I'm going to focus on WiFi - although Bluetooth shouldn't be too tricky in the future.

Mainline on Galaxy S3

Simon Shields — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 01:00:00 GMT

After successfully getting UART working, the next thing to do is boot a mainline kernel. Fortunately, on i9300 we have something of a head start: Samsung has upstreamed some amount of support for "trats2", a variant of the GT-I9300 used as the reference device for Tizen. However, the i9300 and trats2 have different partition layouts and different bootloaders: I learned in IRC that trats2 has a version of Samsung's proprietary bootloader S-BOOT which chainloads u-boot.

UART on Galaxy S3 and Note 2

Simon Shields — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 12:00:00 GMT

Over the next few months (years?) I plan on working on porting several Android-based Exynos 4412-based devices - namely, the Galaxy S3 (of which there are three Exynos4412-based variants), and the Galaxy Note 2 (of which there are two variants). The first step, I figured, was probably to get UART working on the vendor-provided Linux 3.0 kernel: Fortunately, I was not the first person to attempt this, and there are a few guides on constructing a cable suitable for the process.