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Hi folks,
Like many Android is new to me and I've been reading about all of the tools and terminology and very rarely see definitions. Anyway, let me get to the heart of the matter.
Apparently Samsung (and other vendors) enforce digital signatures.
What stage of the boot process are these signatures checked?
What is checked for a signature? (Kernel? Initrd? Boot loader? All?)
What memory does verification code reside in? (Processor boot ROM or flash?)
Is an open source boot loader being used?
It appears that no checking of update.zip is performed and that's been the means of modifying the software on the phone?
So, the end game is being able to download all of the source code and embedded firmware files, (maybe some porting), compile and flash the phone myself. How many non-dev phones has this been accomplished with? Is it likely to happen with the Galaxy S?
I'd like some Froyo.
I can't answer pretty much any of those questions lol but so far the general consensus is that there will be no Froyo on our devices until Samsung releases their own version of it...I'd like to think that the international Galaxy S will get it first, then maybe it will be ported across the rest of the devices. I've a feeling that individual carrier devices in the US will get hung out to dry for awhile sadly. Its a shame too cus Froyo would make this a truly unbeatable powerhouse device
Hey big99gt... Thanks for the effort.
Either nobody knows the answers to these questions (unlikely) or they're not telling. I just wanted to get an idea of how locked down this device is and how difficult it will be to make it do my (our) bidding.
Since most of the source has been released it's great we can compile most of the components. However the key is being able to change the entire boot process... If we can't modify the kernel or the initrd image we're boned on an early Froyo and extensive mods anyway.
What would allow/limits that? Since the kernel source is available, changing the kernel should be fine (the mimocan lag fix shows that). I'm not sure about initrd, but I'm also new to Android.
There is nothing stopping you from running a kernel you compile yourself on the Galaxy S. None of the Galaxy S variants use an encrypyted bootloader. I don't think the default bootloader checks the update.zip for anything beyond a MD5 hash.
Well, now it seems the Captivate may be more "open" than previously thought. Since the source code has been released theres been some pleasant discoveries. I still haven't read what the final verdict is on the drivers yet, but one person on these forums stated that Samsung will be releasing more code this coming week for all the Galaxy S devices.....and that they will be the final piece of the puzzle. I hope its true, Sammy may have done right this time in a big way.
(FWIW, encrypted is a lot different than signed.)
Well this would be welcome news. If the boot chain is wide open and enough source is available to roll our own this will be one heck of a device to play with.
So, yeah I'm a bit on the fence with this one. I have an N5 and I love the notion that it's pretty much the first device to receive updates. But, more often as of late, Google pushes updates via its services and even more recently by making its apps available to all, at least to devices running 4.4.x. So, the importance of being able to run with the very latest Android version has been somewhat mitigated.
The thing that has me concerned right now about the One+ 1 are the very long update cycles of CM. Should Android 5.0 roll out within the next few months, it would mean, based on CM update history, an additional 6 months before CM moves on to it the latest Android version nightlies roundup. 6 months is often longer than it takes even the big manufacturers to skin and update the latest Android version, waiting periods which proud Nexus owners have been able to avoid.
Just curious to hear from Nexus people who are thinking about this device and what any inevitable updates might mean to you?
Well I think official updates are irrelevant as developers here will release their ROMs with line to the latest Google releases for the device.....I will just be buying One for Hardware.......
In an interview of Kondik, he said that now that they're a company and this is their product, they have actual paid devs working on the updates, which should make their code more higher quality and updates faster (though now that they have to make it stable means that it will slow updates down, I hope there will be a nightly channel)
mannu_in said:
Well I think official updates are irrelevant as developers here will release their ROMs with line to the latest Google releases for the device.....I will just be buying One for Hardware.......
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Don't bet on that. Look at how poorly the community CM builds (i'm talking official nightlies, those are "community" builds from the point of view of Cyngn) for the Oppo N1 are. It's Cyngn's official position that they don't care at all if the community builds are completely broken and that users should have no expectations whatsoever from them.
Use nightline updates and you'll be happy :laugh: it helps a lot to devs make CM better and better
From the official point of view CM have said in a previous interview that we should expect 4 months on a major android version upgrade in CM11S.
I think that's pretty decent, anyone in need of a faster update schedule should jump on the nightly train, or find another rom
MrAndroid-HD said:
From the official point of view CM have said in a previous interview that we should expect 4 months on a major android version upgrade in CM11S.
I think that's pretty decent, anyone in need of a faster update schedule should jump on the nightly train, or find another rom
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Right, but in terms of waiting times, I was referring even to the nightlies cycle. After a new Android release version, it usually takes months before they start to work on it. The stable releases, even the monthly ones, would take even longer. Correct me I'm wrong, but those hoping to jump on the nightlies cycle after the next version might be in for a rude awakening. But, in terms of stability for the nightlies, I have no doubt, they could be used as daily drivers, that is, if they open up nightlies to the general public.
floepie said:
Right, but in terms of waiting times, I was referring even to the nightlies cycle. After a new Android release version, it usually takes months before they start to work on it. The stable releases, even the monthly ones, would take even longer. Correct me I'm wrong, but those hoping to jump on the nightlies cycle after the next version might be in for a rude awakening. But, in terms of stability for the nightlies, I have no doubt, they could be used as daily drivers, that is, if they open up nightlies to the general public.
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Remmember this is a special verison of CM, there is nothing like it used to that you can rely on. I know how things where in the past, but this is really one of their first projects where they are the main system on the phone from start - I know they where on the Oppo N1 also from the beginnign, but as far as I know, there weren't made a set deal like with the OnePlus..
Here OnePlus have a 2 year contract on a special version of CM.. Only time will tell us how much it differs from their normal releases..
As said before, the Cyanogen transition from a hobby to a company might give a huge benefit here.
It's true that the waiting time between stable releases has historically been quite poor, but I have extremely good experiences with CM nightlies. I'm running nightlies on my Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7, and I can't really complain about anything. Hopefully we'll have an easy opt-in to the nightlies (like there is currently) and that the first nightlies get pushed out fast as Android is updated.
Also, we'll always have community builds.
Honestly, as long as they open source whatever code they use for the screen-off wake gestures, I don't care what I run on the device. As previously mentioned by others, I'm buying the hardware, not the software.
LiquidSolstice said:
Honestly, as long as they open source whatever code they use for the screen-off wake gestures, I don't care what I run on the device. As previously mentioned by others, I'm buying the hardware, not the software.
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That's done via touchscreen controller firmware - which isn't itself opensource (it's just a blob encoded into a header file within the kernel), but will work no matter what you're running on the device with a only a few tweaks to the frameworks/kernel. Plenty of projects have experience with these tweaks since the Oppo N1 had the same capability.
floepie said:
So, yeah I'm a bit on the fence with this one. I have an N5 and I love the notion that it's pretty much the first device to receive updates. But, more often as of late, Google pushes updates via its services and even more recently by making its apps available to all, at least to devices running 4.4.x. So, the importance of being able to run with the very latest Android version has been somewhat mitigated.
The thing that has me concerned right now about the One+ 1 are the very long update cycles of CM. Should Android 5.0 roll out within the next few months, it would mean, based on CM update history, an additional 6 months before CM moves on to it the latest Android version nightlies roundup. 6 months is often longer than it takes even the big manufacturers to skin and update the latest Android version, waiting periods which proud Nexus owners have been able to avoid.
Just curious to hear from Nexus people who are thinking about this device and what any inevitable updates might mean to you?
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Keep in mind they were just an independent developers they were getting some random people WHO ACTUALLY WANTED to help maintain some devices even while there wasn't any driver or source code avaliable (Samsung) which is really hard. They didn't had any office and they weren't getting paid for that. Now they have access to all tools from Google and other manufacturers such as Qualcomm and other drivers which gives them much more possibilities like LG, Samsung or Sony already had from the beginning. CyanogenMod 11S will be much more stable and easier for deliever.
maxver0 said:
Keep in mind they were just an independent developers they were getting some random people WHO ACTUALLY WANTED to help maintain some devices even while there wasn't any driver or source code avaliable (Samsung) which is really hard. They didn't had any office and they weren't getting paid for that. Now they have access to all tools from Google and other manufacturers such as Qualcomm and other drivers which gives them much more possibilities like LG, Samsung or Sony already had from the beginning. CyanogenMod 11S will be much more stable and easier for deliever.
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Except that they've already had one official partner device (Oppo N1) where the user experience was actually WORSE for most people than many of the community-supported devices.
Entropy512 said:
Except that they've already had one official partner device (Oppo N1) where the user experience was actually WORSE for most people than many of the community-supported devices.
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I don't know users experiences about Oppo N1 but I do know that CyanogenMod didn't get as many tools from Oppo as they do have now from Oneplus and their hardware partners. Abhisek Devkota from CyanogenMod have been talking about it somewhere on Google plus. I'm not going to sit on cyanogenmod anyway most likely, especially when there will be support from Slimkat and francisco. Reminder: Oneplus One will be fully unlocked and sources will be avaliable for everyone.
If anyone thinks CM is slow I had 4.4 on my tf700 within one month. Nightlies of course.
maxver0 said:
I don't know users experiences about Oppo N1 but I do know that CyanogenMod didn't get as many tools from Oppo as they do have now from Oneplus and their hardware partners. Abhisek Devkota from CyanogenMod have been talking about it somewhere on Google plus. I'm not going to sit on cyanogenmod anyway most likely, especially when there will be support from Slimkat and francisco. Reminder: Oneplus One will be fully unlocked and sources will be avaliable for everyone.
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That's bull****. The only thing they can blame Oppo on is the initial O-Click fiasco - nothing beyond that. (And I'm letting them slide for the O-Click mess, that really wasn't their fault)
Any failures beyond that have nothing to do with Oppo and everything to do with Cyngn. If you look at oppoforums, the Oppo section of the CM G+ community, and CM's own forums, they're full of users saying they're switching to Omni... Which happens to be maintained by people who got the N1 1-2 months later than Cyngn, aren't paid to work on the device, and didn't have anywhere close to the level of access to Oppo engineers and documentation (Cyngn signed an NDA for Qualcomm docs, we didn't).
So if users are reporting all over that they're switching to a project which had LESS of everything that Cyngn said they didn't have enough of - don't you think something is wrong there?
dracinn said:
If anyone thinks CM is slow I had 4.4 on my tf700 within one month. Nightlies of course.
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We're not talking about nightlies here, since there's no guarantee for users that they'll be anything but crap. Cyngn is ADAMANT about this position. If community builds (nightlies) for a Cyngn device are broken, you're SOL.
Entropy512 said:
Any failures beyond that have nothing to do with Oppo and everything to do with Cyngn. If you look at oppoforums, the Oppo section of the CM G+ community, and CM's own forums, they're full of users saying they're switching to Omni... Which happens to be maintained by people who got the N1 1-2 months later than Cyngn, aren't paid to work on the device, and didn't have anywhere close to the level of access to Oppo engineers and documentation (Cyngn signed an NDA for Qualcomm docs, we didn't).
So if users are reporting all over that they're switching to a project which had LESS of everything that Cyngn said they didn't have enough of - don't you think something is wrong there?
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Well that someone prefer more one rom than the other doesn't prove anything. I prefer custom rom Slimkat on my Nexus 4 even if stock is super stable or even a cyanogenmod rom on my phone. I tried OmniRom on my N4 tho but I couldn't find multiwindow at all in rom so I flashed over something else...
I know newer kernels contain performance tweaks and better low-level management. I also know its a pain to get compatible modules working on newer kernels. But is an upgrade worth it? I'm thinking with a newer kernel we could get better drivers working on the SOC. Maybe some newer drivers even?
To get around the wifi module issue, we could take it from another phone with the same kernel version and sign it.
Should we maybe think about attempting a 4.x port for the kernel?
Here's an rough example of what I'm thinking: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-port-newer-kernel-on-a-Android-device-with-existing-kernel
It would take months or years to even get a bootable kernel, plus many things wouldn't work or won't ever work.
I don't believe that anybody would actually spend so much time getting 4.x kernel booting. It's just not worth it.
It would be enough to backport some of the features from newer kernel revisions.
But doing something more than that? Nah, worthless.
As I already said, it doesn't worth it.
The biggest thing that it will most likely introduce ABI breakage (incompatibility with blobs).
On the other side - 4.4 caf tags don't support 8953, so we will be forced to do a huge kangbang of 3.18 drivers and then it will be pretty much impossible to do further CAF tracking.
Did you use search?
No you didn't.
alkesh95 said:
Did you use search?
No you didn't.
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Thanks for bringing it to my attention this question was already answered. I reported it for the mods as a duplicate post.
Thread closed at OP request.
I wonder why after roughly 3 years Still no one showing interest in developing a custom rom for our first grade phone? Before they claimed that it is on pause because no has the kernel source code, but now we have access to the official source code and yet no one developed a brand new custom rom for Nokia phone.
Please if anyone could help write a comment below.
to be honest, at this point i simply dont care whatever is happening in this community. If you have knowledge of building a custom rom then why not giving it a go?
i simply dont possess the knowledge at the same time i am also not complaining.
Ok, so first: Nokia 8 launched in September 2017. According to my calculator, thats roughly one and a half year since it came out. Not three.
Then, regarding kernel sources: The official kernel sources for our phone are from the Oreo 8.0 release. It's possible to use older kernels for newer ROMs, but it is really not recommended. And I am not even speaking of the fact that those official kernel sources still require edits to even work. There is no support from Nokia / HMD for development on this phone. Even their unlocker app doesn't work on the majority of versions and completely broke after 2 security patches.
I would be suprised if you can find any developer who is willing to spend their time fighting the stuff that gets thrown between our feet. (broken kernel source, not being able to temporary boot images and having to flash them instead, no working kernel sources from hmd, no reliable bootloader unlock, no official rescue tool etc. etc.) And usually, developers make things because their either need them themselves, or for the joy of creating something and sharing it with people who appreciate it. And when you can port a ROM, you can make the edits you want for yourself with Magisk, so reason 1 is already not applicable.
And as hard as it might sound, this community is by no means large enough to justify porting a ROM you dont need and risking your device stability / userdata in the process.
So the TL;DR; is probably: Either do it yourself, or expect it to never actually happen, as harsh as it sounds, sadly.
THMSP said:
Ok, so first: Nokia 8 launched in September 2017. According to my calculator, thats roughly one and a half year since it came out. Not three.
Then, regarding kernel sources: The official kernel sources for our phone are from the Oreo 8.0 release. It's possible to use older kernels for newer ROMs, but it is really not recommended. And I am not even speaking of the fact that those official kernel sources still require edits to even work. There is no support from Nokia / HMD for development on this phone. Even their unlocker app doesn't work on the majority of versions and completely broke after 2 security patches.
I would be suprised if you can find any developer who is willing to spend their time fighting the stuff that gets thrown between our feet. (broken kernel source, not being able to temporary boot images and having to flash them instead, no working kernel sources from hmd, no reliable bootloader unlock, no official rescue tool etc. etc.) And usually, developers make things because their either need them themselves, or for the joy of creating something and sharing it with people who appreciate it. And when you can port a ROM, you can make the edits you want for yourself with Magisk, so reason 1 is already not applicable.
And as hard as it might sound, this community is by no means large enough to justify porting a ROM you dont need and risking your device stability / userdata in the process.
So the TL;DR; is probably: Either do it yourself, or expect it to never actually happen, as harsh as it sounds, sadly.
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I can't agree with you more, I was just wondered how this newly released phone still has no custom rom while my LG G3 still after those years received many from lots of developers.
So sad to see our beloved NOKIA has no juice to compete in this race.
error748 said:
I can't agree with you more, I was just wondered how this newly released phone still has no custom rom while my LG G3 still after those years received many from lots of developers.
So sad to see our beloved NOKIA has no juice to compete in this race.
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We all found out the hard way what Nokia was about by being early adopters. To me they are only interested in pushing their next device and Android One is making that easier for them. So much so the 8 is long since off their radar. It was an 'OK' phone for the money, but there's better now and it's them I'll be looking to this year.
At this point its best to just modify the current stock rom yourself by debloating it, installing kernel tweking modules via magisk, installing themes via substratum and customizing the interface using GravityBox and Xposed Edge. Thats the closest we will come to having a custom rom experience. Ive accepted that no developer will bother with this phone given all the devices that have come out since its release.
Its a lesson learnt. I love this phone but I will never buy another Nokia phone ever again. Im currently saving up for a Xiaomi phone and will use this Nokia 8 as a secondary phone in due time.
MDV106 said:
At this point its best to just modify the current stock rom yourself by debloating it, installing kernel tweking modules via magisk, installing themes via substratum and customizing the interface using GravityBox and Xposed Edge. Thats the closest we will come to having a custom rom experience. Ive accepted that no developer will bother with this phone given all the devices that have come out since its release.
Its a lesson learnt. I love this phone but I will never buy another Nokia phone ever again. Im currently saving up for a Xiaomi phone and will use this Nokia 8 as a secondary phone in due time.
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Poco or 1+ here
MDV106 said:
At this point its best to just modify the current stock rom yourself by debloating it, installing kernel tweking modules via magisk, installing themes via substratum and customizing the interface using GravityBox and Xposed Edge. Thats the closest we will come to having a custom rom experience. Ive accepted that no developer will bother with this phone given all the devices that have come out since its release.
Its a lesson learnt. I love this phone but I will never buy another Nokia phone ever again. Im currently saving up for a Xiaomi phone and will use this Nokia 8 as a secondary phone in due time.
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Me too, my next phone would be OnePlus 6T or Oppo.
Never ever ever go around nokia phones again
Hi everyone,
I bugged HMD about not releasing more recent source code for the Nokia 8 and a few days ago they updated their site with links to code for the Android 9 builds. Note they still haven't published the latest build (5.150) nor and 4.88 builds nor any Android 7.1x builds.
I checked the archives and they are different from the previous 4.84 release, but I've no idea if they are buildable. They still look like they might be missing some useful bits, from my limited knowledge. Those of you who know what to do with this can test it and see if it's useful to you.
Let me know if you would like me to keep bugging them about the 4.88 build's code, or even any earlier 3.x builds.
Have fun!
Cheers
Thanks for bugging them!
Sadly it still contains the same device tree typos that the previous NB1 and even A1N sources contained, so without fixing them those trees do build but won't work correctly as the display won't be accessed correctly (half the screen will be white IIRC).
To be clear, this is what I mean: https://github.com/resident-nokia/u...f68ad2f#diff-6ea71fa79b281dd80cbab0bea96d9472
Also, as a funfact: A quick diff I did showed that the 5140 source is identical to the 4120 kernel source from Nokia 8 Sirocco that was released around December if I am not mistaken (minus the device tree files and some places where device names were hardcoded). That would mean that our kernel hasn't seen an update since December (actually even September, since thats the first CAF tag (Qualcomm upstream) that has changes you can find in those sources). Customer service I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hi @THMSP!
Thanks for checking it out, shame it's still got errors in it. That's very interesting about the comparison with the Sirocco and the last change being in September. I suppose a new build doesn't automatically mean a new kernel though.
Since both the Android 8 and 9 source contain errors my only wonder is if the Android 7 source would also have errors, or if it might actually work?! I will ask them for it.
Cheers
EDIT: So the device tree is there after all? I had obviously misunderstood some of the other conversations I'd read, I had always thought it was missing. So it seems the device tree is there, but broken? Or only partially there, and what is there is broken?
The device tree files are all there, but they contain four serious typos that cause them to not actually work when you boot your compiled kernel. The rest of the source code does work. Correcting those typos is not much of a deal, but it is annoying (and personally I wonder how on earth they even maintain these sources).
The other annyoing issue is that for any custom or mismatching kernel the wifi driver won't load (because of signature enforcement for kernel modules), so if you want to make a kernel that doesn't break wifi, you need to add the Qualcomm wifi driver yourself (which then requires additional patches to actually work as well).
When you do those two things, the kernel will work just like the one that Nokia is shipping. For example, my TWRP builds for NB1 actually use the kernel source code for Sirocco, but with the (corrected) device tree files from NB1, and a patched version of the qualcomm wifi driver compiled into the kernel directly.
I am not sure if the nougat sources would help that much to be honest. It's not like those sources are broken because HMD / FIH don't know how to fix them, I bet they break them on purpose (or they get broken by the tool they use to package them). So any further release by them will probably contain the same stupid errors.
Wow! That's a lot to do to make them usable. I agree that I have many questions about QC and QA in the software for these phones, not only because of the source code releases.
You did very well making the device tree for the NB1 then and getting TWRP running, well done! And thanks
Like many I'm interested in the possibility of running other OSes on the NB1, particularly /e/ and any that run on Halium. I presume it will still take a lot of work to get another OS running on the NB1, but is it doable? I think in all cases these projects start from a LOS base.
Cheers
madb1lly said:
Wow! That's a lot to do to make them usable. I agree that I have many questions about QC and QA in the software for these phones, not only because of the source code releases.
You did very well making the device tree for the NB1 then and getting TWRP running, well done! And thanks
Like many I'm interested in the possibility of running other OSes on the NB1, particularly /e/ and any that run on Halium. I presume it will still take a lot of work to get another OS running on the NB1, but is it doable? I think in all cases these projects start from a LOS base.
Cheers
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Most of the work regarding TWRP and the kernel was actually done by @dg28gadhavi - I just tried to update everything a bit and adapt it to all the new bootloader bugs features that were introduced over time. He deserves all the credit, otherwise I would've had nothing to learn all this stuff from.
Regarding custom ROMs: Sure it is possible. But it is a huge amount of work, that requires you to risk your device (Snapdragon chips are unbrickable, but you couldn't use it as a daily driver), with potentially very few people actually caring (or even donating etc.). When you reached the point where you are able to port a ROM, you have the knowledge to make the changes that you need yourself with Magisk as well. So the only real reason to port a ROM is to give something to the community. And the Nokia 8 community simply isn't big enough that anyone would do that, imo.
Well thanks for @dg28gadhavi as well then!
Yes, I have read that Magisk can do most of what a custom Android ROM might have done. I have some reservations about Magisk, since it's not open source I don't know if I fully trust it, but that could also be the case for most of the software I use! Personally I'm interested most in /e/, which is currently built of a LOS base, but I don't know if all the customisations they've done (mainly to remove any communication with Google services) can be done with Magisk.
As for Halium-relate OSes (Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, Sailfish OS, LuneOS... some others too), Magisk can't recreate those as they're basically completely different from Android, they just run off the Android kernel and use libhybris to interface with the Bionic library drivers; the rest of Android is not used.
Anyway, this is all beyond my available time at present, so I will just have to carry on with stock Android maybe with some Magisk customisations until my phone breaks!
Cheers
madb1lly said:
I have some reservations about Magisk, since it's not open source I don't know if I fully trust it
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Magisk is completely opensource, it has always been: https://github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk
You might be thinking about SuperSU which was / is indeed closed source