Add mainline kernel for Samsung Galaxy S III mini (samsung-golden)
Add a mainline kernel package for the Samsung Galaxy S III mini (samsung-golden). The ST-Ericsson NovaThor U8500 SoC already has great support in Linux mainline. Together with Linus Walleij (maintainer of the SoC in mainline) I have been working on making it work on the (few) Samsung/Sony smartphones that were released with this SoC.
Right now the mainline kernel is only used for samsung-golden
, but it could be also used for samsung-janice
(cc @drebrez) and linusw is working on making it work for samsung-skomer
.
The following features are currently working for samsung-golden
on mainline:
- Display (partial - works but cannot be turned off properly)
- GPU (Mali 400 MP using Lima)
- Touchscreen
- WiFi
- Bluetooth (partial - at least on my device scanning for other devices works but it keeps disconnecting when connecting to other devices; not sure why)
- IMU (Accelerometer + Gyroscope)
- USB
Audio is technically supported for this SoC in mainline but so far I have been unable to get it working...
Due to problems in the Samsung bootloader, the mainline kernel can be only booted using an extra (intermediate) bootloader. I have ported (mainline) U-Boot, which can be installed as normal Android boot image, see https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/ST-Ericsson_NovaThor_U8500#U-Boot. At the moment, it provides an Android Fastboot interface, but in the future it could potentially be used similar to the Pine* devices instead.
Since pmbootstrap does not support multiple flashing methods for one device, this changes the device package to use Fastboot instead (which allows using pmbootstrap flasher boot
). U-Boot can also boot the downstream kernel, so this shouldn't be any problem for the downstream package. It's just an extra requirement you have to install (manually) before using postmarketOS.