CyanogenMod ports

Valentin · May 2, 2016, 8:39pm

Hi!

Last week Adam Farden posted a status of his work on the CyanogenMod port on the dev-fxos mailing list.
This work is pretty exciting, in the sense that CyanogenMod target 150+ devices, Adam was able to test it on 16 devices and says it works beautiful.

More details can be find in his latest message:

The CM port is not inherently difficult or complicated, most of the work is finding how to make all the existing systems work together. It just needs someone who likes porting retail devices. Someone who knows the Android and CyanogenMod build systems well, plus knows just enough about all the different projects that make AOSP/CM/B2G to fix the conflicts. That’s why I was asked to do it in the first place, I’ve been hacking on all three projects on several devices for many years.

The difficulty is simply the scale of AOSP, it takes a long time to know your way around this huge project. AOSP now has well over 500 projects in its manifest.
My documentation is already on MDN. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS/Porting_Firefox_OS/Porting_on_CyanogenMod

It may seem brief but I built my CM port to do much of the hard work automatically. I wanted the guide to be as simple as possible for a CM device maintainer to get B2G working. Therefore the guide assumes your device already has a CM port and that you know how to build it. it’s essentially a guide on how to transform your existing CM port to build on B2G. Porting a device from scratch was beyond the scope of my job.

If you want to know how I got B2G to build on CM you’ll have to dive into the git history. I generally did a good job of adding comments to my bigger changes so you should be able to figure it out.

To be specific, most of the magic is in these repos:
https://github.com/cm-b2g/B2Ghttps://github.com/cm-b2g/b2g-manifest
https://github.com/cm-b2g/b2g-updates
https://github.com/cm-b2g/platform_build
https://github.com/cm-b2g/platform_vendor_cm-fake

Did you get the chance to test it?

Thatoo · April 6, 2016, 4:51pm

Would it be possible to know the list of these 16 devices?

lissyx · April 7, 2016, 10:15am

Having worked with Adam on this, he tested this on several Sony devices that are part of the Open Device initiative from Sony. We also got success into booting LG G2 and LG G3 devices with (mostly) everything being functionnal as much as we could test and what was broken was often due to Gecko and hackable. Wileyfox Swift support is also based on that effort (and there is blobfree build made of it available through the B2G Installer Addon for Firefox). We got successfull build out of a hackathon in Paris on Samsung Galaxy S4 yet nobody could verify on a real device in time :/.

Thatoo · April 7, 2016, 10:26am

Is it based on CM12 or CM 13?
Open Device initiative from Sony… I can’t figure out if th Z3 Dual is part of it or not?

lissyx · April 7, 2016, 10:31am

Based on CM 12.1. Gecko and Gonk needs some love to support M. About Z3 Dual, I know there is kernel support for this, but I don’t have the device and I the time to test it.

Valentin · April 7, 2016, 12:00pm

Thanks for your answers @lissyx.

@Thatoo if you wish to ask Adam directly, try either on the mailing list (link above) or ping adfad666 on IRC.
In any case let us know what you find out, the list of tested devices belongs to the doc!

Thatoo · April 7, 2016, 12:59pm

Here is Adam’s answer about Z3 Dual. It gives me some hope.

I don’t have any dual SIM devices, but the Z3 device
repos should already support the dual sim variants. It should simply be a
matter of extracting the correct modem firmware blobs and adding the
correct config for Gecko to know it is a dual sim device.
I suggest checking how the other FxOS devices do DualSIM, I think flame is a dual SIM device.
I won’t be able to offer more help as I no longer work for Mozilla.
Good luck!
Adam

krz37 · April 20, 2016, 8:24pm

Hi,

I guess I should post this here. I want to work on teaching people how to use the work allowing to port FXOS from CM base but first I need to get my hands on it properly, I expected it to go more smoothly but as I was learning to build CM12 on Z3C, I got the following error :

build/core/product_config.mk:239: *** _nic.PRODUCTS.[[device/sony/z3c/cm.mk]]: “vendor/sony/msm8974-common/msm8974-common-vendor.mk” does not exist. Stop.

Is anyone experienced with building CM? It seems the CM wiki is quite outdated and some github repo that the scripts are using disappeared. I will also contact Adam about that.
Thank you

Valentin · April 21, 2016, 9:31am

Thanks for letting us know, please keep us updated.

lissyx · April 21, 2016, 10:30am

Adam told me we might be facing expected bitrotting that happens because CM already moved to M base

krz37 · April 21, 2016, 11:18am

After checking one by one the github repos it seems they are actually here, I don’t really know why I got 404 and it was not the first time. Have you compiled any CM12.1 recently?

Valentin · April 27, 2016, 9:50pm

Hello,
Any update on this?