User:Hailfinger/Mainline Calling the 2nd

One Success of postmarketOS: Mainline Calling!

Over the last few months, the awesome people working on postmarketOS have achieved the seemingly unreachable: Mainline Calling! You may remember the post with a similar title from almost two years ago: Back then we were happy to have running a mainline kernel on a phone as an achievable target, even if nothing except booting would work. Making an actual phone call was still so far away that almost nobody dared dreaming about it. A few months ago, we got working calls on the Pinephone, but for postmarketOS to be a post-market OS in the literal sense, we'd have to achieve the same goal on preexisting hardware.

The Linux kernels shipped with Android phones are generally already old at the time a phone is released, and even firmware updates to newer Android versions won't update the kernel with more than a few select fixes. The code quality of those vendor-provided kernels also generally isn't exactly stellar for various reasons (time to market, unreviewed code, ...). Making a phone or tablet run a current kernel can be a herculean task, and more often than not it involves rewriting drivers from scratch to fit the strict Linux kernel quality and coding style requirements. As such, every supported component on a mainline kernel in a mobile device is a reason for celebration.

In February, someone (FIXME: who? User:Minecrell) managed to start a phone call on a msm8916 (Qualcomm Snapdragon 410) phone (FIXME: which? Samsung_Galaxy_A5_2015_(samsung-a5ulte)) running a mainline Linux kernel with minimal patches, but audio wasn't yet in a state where anything but silence was possible. Over the last few days, we (FIXME: who? User:Minecrell) managed to get real phone calls with audio working, and now you can enjoy this as well on the following phones: (FIXME: list? almost every phone on msm8916, at least Samsung_Galaxy_A5_2015_(samsung-a5ulte), Wileyfox_Swift_(wileyfox-crackling) and probably Motorola_Moto_G4_Play_(motorola-harpia) were tested).

The importance of this milestone cannot be overstated: Working smartphones with kernels more than a year ahead of what you can get from current top-of-the-line Android smartphones. Sure, not all features are supported yet (camera, ... (FIXME: camera support for msm8916 has landed recently in mainline Linux kernel)), but you can now use smartphones as phones, running the latest mainline kernel.

So let's celebrate and join us on our journey to enable more phones and more features!