How to find device-specific information
Android
Generic device information
- LineageOS devices database (hardware specs: architecture, screen resolution, ... and key combinations for flash/recovery mode)
- Use the "cat /proc/cpuinfo" in terminal to get some CPU information.
Fastboot (boot.img) flash offsets
pmbootstrap bootimg_analyze automatizes this and directly gives you what you need to put in the deviceinfo file (more). The information below is only kept for reference, but do yourself a favor and use the automated version instead. |
If you can't find a full ROM image for your device, consider extracting the boot.img file directly from your device with adb.
- Find the download link for a full image on https://download.lineageos.org/
Run the following commands (replace the download link accordingly)
pmbootstrap build mkbootimg-osm0sis pmbootstrap chroot apk add mkbootimg-osm0sis su - user mkdir /tmp/bootimg_info cd /tmp/bootimg_info wget "https://mirrorbits.lineageos.org/full/hammerhead/20170530/lineage-14.1-20170530-nightly-hammerhead-signed.zip" unzip *.zip unpackbootimg -i boot.img
Example output:
Android magic found at: 0 BOARD_KERNEL_CMDLINE console=ttyHSL0,115200,n8 androidboot.hardware=hammerhead user_debug=31 maxcpus=2 msm_watchdog_v2.enable=1 androidboot.bootdevice=msm_sdcc.1 buildvariant=userdebug BOARD_KERNEL_BASE 00008000 BOARD_RAMDISK_OFFSET 02900000 BOARD_SECOND_OFFSET 00f00000 BOARD_TAGS_OFFSET 02700000 BOARD_PAGE_SIZE 2048 BOARD_SECOND_SIZE 0 BOARD_DT_SIZE 0
Translate the variables as follows into your deviceinfo:
BOARD_KERNEL_CMDLINE
->deviceinfo_kernel_cmdline
BOARD_KERNEL_BASE
->deviceinfo_flash_offset_kernel
BOARD_RAMDISK_OFFSET
->deviceinfo_flash_offset_ramdisk
BOARD_SECOND_OFFSET
->deviceinfo_flash_offset_second
BOARD_TAGS_OFFSET
->deviceinfo_flash_offset_tags
BOARD_PAGE_SIZE
->deviceinfo_flash_pagesize
BOARD_SECOND_SIZE
andBOARD_DT_SIZE
can both be ignored- (contents of the extracted
boot.img-base
file) ->deviceinfo_flash_offset_base
(defaults to0x10000000
)
NOTE: Some useful info can be pulled via fastboot too (in case you have the device at hand) by executing fastboot getvar all
Kernel version
Device Architecture
- You can find the architecture while the device is running another kernel (e.g. original Android or TWRP). Run
adb shell
to gain access to the console on the device, and typeuname -m
. - pmOS supports the
armhf
,armv7
, andaarch64
architectures. If the output isarmv7l
, for example, you should usearmv7
as your device architecture.
Device code name
- LineageOS List
- List for Samsung Galaxy Devices
- List of codenames from the AndroidDeviceNames library
LineageOS kernel source repository
- Find out the code name of your device (see above)
- Usually, you can find the kernel source repository by typing in the code name of your device into the LineageOS GitHub page
- If you can't find it, but you found a repository starting with
android_device_
, open that repository and look into thelineage.dependencies
file. It lists other LineageOS repositories there - open these repositories, until you finally find the repository with "kernel" in the name. Example: First, Second, Third: Kernel repo!
Other locations for kernel repositories
- CyanogenMod (same instructions as for LinageOS)
- legacyxperia project
- Samsung Opensource Release Center
- LG Electronics Open Source Distribution system
- Xiaomi Open Source Kernel Repository
- TWRP
- Download a working recovery OS (TWRP/CWM), and extract the Linux version string from the kernel, then search for that kernel on GitHub / on the web
Kernel defconfig (default config)
Sometimes the Android build process uses more than one kernel config and merges them, see #1307 (comment) |
DEFCONFIG=
line inside thebuild.config
inside the kernel repository (if available) (example)- Official listing
- If you found the
android_device_
repository (as shown in LineageOS kernel source repository above), look for aTARGET_KERNEL_CONFIG
line in the BoardConfig.mk.
In the case where you have located the kernel source for your device but there is no build.config
, have a look at the arch/arm/configs/
directory. E.g. for Moto G 2014 "titan" that uses android_kernel_motorola_msm8226 you have a titan_defconfig file there.
Misc info from BoardConfig.mk
Example, contains the following information:
- kernel commandline
- ramdisk offset, tags offset, pagesize, base
- boot partition size
Firmware files
If your device has an official LineageOS port, you can find the proprietary files, which often also include the firmware, at TheMuppets. Do note, that if you're using the "Find file" (shortcut: T), that it might not find all files as those repositories are generally quite big and not completely indexed by GitHub.
In the case that your device has an unofficial LineageOS port, you can often find a repository in the same naming scheme (proprietary_vendor_MANUFACTURER) at the same location as the kernel source and device tree.
Find
If you can't find the firmware for your device in an existing repo, you will have to grab them from your device or an OTA image.
In some cases it's a partition that's mounted at /firmware
(e.g. labelled modem
), in other cases /firmware
will have multiple partitions mounted into subdirectories (e.g. labelled radio
, adsp
& wcnss
). Consult the fstab of your installation for different mount points.
In other cases, the firmware will just be in the normal filesystem, e.g. at /vendor/firmware/
, /etc/firmware
or other locations. You can use the find
command to search for e.g. *.mbn
There's also the possibility of extracting the firmware from a file called NON-HLOS.bin
which is sometimes delivered with OTA updates. These images are FAT32 images which can be mounted with sudo mount -o ro NON-HLOS.bin mountpoint
.
Extract
The firmware of interest for us is adsp.*
, mba.*
, modem.*
and wcnss.*
. Note that not all of those firmware files exist on all devices.
The next step is to import those files into a git repository and pushing it to a publicly accessible location.
Package
The procedure on how to package firmware and how to add a nonfree-firmware subpackage to the device package is documented here.
Device tree source (dts)
If you can't find the proper dts anywhere, and typical sources like LineageOS or TWRP are just appending a binary blob (dtb, device tree blob), it should be possible to decompile that blob and add it as patch to your linux package. It was done like this in pmaports!573 for example. From a license perspective, this should also be fine, because the Linux kernel is released under the GPLv2.