Porting a new device to Plasma Mobile

Plasma Mobile currently only supports device running a mainline Linux kernel.

Many consumer mobile devices are Android only and do not work with the Linux kernel directly. Android provides a Hardware abstraction layer on top of the Linux kernel. Even if the Linux kernel sources for the device are open, the Android environment is Bionic (not glibc or Musl) and HAL-specific, so Android drivers cannot be used in a general Linux kernel environment directly.

There are projects to support devices without mainline Linux. First of all, libhybris from Mer project and others. Project called Halium uses libhybris to provide a distro-agnostic Hardware Abstraction.

Previously Plasma Mobile also supported Halium devices (using Android kernel+userspace) but the support was dropped in favor of focusing on the mainline device.

To port a device to mainline Linux, please refer to Porting to a new device in postmarketOS wiki.

See also