Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0 2015 (samsung-gt58)

Samsung Galaxy Tab A (2015) is a series of devices based on Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 SoC which has great mainline Linux support.

This page should generally apply to any 8.0 inch variant of the device (WiFi, LTE, with and without the pen support). Note that those variants may have different amount of RAM. For 9.7 inch variants see Samsung Galaxy Tab A 9.7.

Variant differences
The device has multiple variants, the main differences in the features are shown in the table below:

Note: The WiFi variant gt58wifi chipset is APQ8016.

Contributors

 * Hello-world-321

Maintainer(s)

 * TravMurav

How to enter flash mode
Download mode: When turned off hold Power + Volume Up + Home

lk2nd Fastboot: When turned off hold Power + Volume Down

Known Bugs and Workarounds
This is a known issue: The touch controller sends the events in a different format that the driver can decode. Fix is WIP.
 * Multi-touch doesn't work

Charger driver is not present at this time. Turn off your device and plug it in. The device will boot and get charged. You can check if the device charges by reading the value from
 * How to charge device ?

Turn display off (lock device using power button) and turn on again to remove artifacts until next brightness change. Auto brightness should be turned off due display bug.
 * Display Artifacts during brightness adjustment

Select headset from settings after plugging in headset (Known issue)
 * Automatically switch to headset and turn off speakers when headset plugged in or cannot switch to speakers during phone calls

Mainline Kernel Status
Table of components in the device Running some diagnostics programs on Android will likely point out some more info about sensors and any other specifications.

Patch to enable otg
The following patch modifies max77843 extcon driver for max77849 and adds support in device tree

After applying this patch the driver will not work for max77843. There are unhandled interrupts which will be disabled by linux.

Patch

Reference datasheets (similar devices)
 * MFD : https://www.infinite-electronic.kr/datasheet/94-MAX14616AEWA.pd
 * Charger : https://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/MAX77860.pdf
 * Others :
 * https://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/MAX77818.pdf
 * https://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/MAX77829.pdf

GPS investigation gt58wifi (SM-T350)
Considering SM-T350 as similar to SM-T35x without a sim card, GPS access is probably not possible at present due to (at minimum) upstream modem (manager) issues GNSS (GPS).

If you're interested in bringing up the modem/gps on APQ variants of the device, feel free to reach out to travmurav via pmOS Matrix_and_IRC channels.