Honor 9 Lite (huawei-leland)

Features
Flashing	Broken
USB Networking	Works
Internal storage
SD card
Battery
Screen	Works
Touchscreen	Works
Multimedia
3D Acceleration
Audio
Camera
Camera Flash
Connectivity
WiFi
Bluetooth
GPS
NFC
Modem
Calls
SMS
Mobile data
Miscellaneous
FDE
USB OTG
HDMI/DP
Sensors
Accelerometer
Magnetometer
Ambient Light
Proximity
Hall Effect
Haptics
Barometer

Huawei Honor 9 Lite
	; Honor 9 Lite with framebuffer and usb net working
Manufacturer	Huawei
Name	Honor 9 Lite
Codename	huawei-leland
Released	2017
Type	handset
Hardware
Chipset	HiSilicon Kirin 659
CPU	4x 2.36 GHz Cortex-A53; 4x 1.7 GHz Cortex-A53
GPU	ARM Mali-T830 MP2
Display	1080x2160 IPS LCD
Storage	32/64 GB, microSD up to 256 GB (uses SIM 2 slot)
Memory	3/4 GB
Architecture	aarch64
Software
Original software	Android (EMUI)
Original version	8 (EMUI 8.0)
Extended version	9 (EMUI 9.1)
postmarketOS
Category	testing
Pre-built images	no
Mainline	no

Contributors

aa13q

Maintainer(s)

How to enter flash mode

With power off, press power und volume-down at the same time, with the usb-cable plugged in.

How to flash

As Huawei changed the partition layout, there is no boot partition anymore. Instead there is a ramdisk and a seperate kernel partition. In order to create the correct images the following steps need to be done:

Get mkbootimg and unpackbootimg i.e. from here or from archlinux aur repo.

You can extract the kernel-image and ramdisk from the created boot.img with unpackbootimg.

$ # copy created boot image to current directory 
$ cp ~/.local/var/pmbootstrap/chroot_rootfs_huawei-leland/boot/boot.img-huawei-leland .

$ # extract the created boot.img
$ mkdir pmos-boot-huawei-leland
$ unpackbootimg -i boot.img-huawei-leland -o pmos-boot-huawei-leland/

Use the extracted files in the following steps.

Create ramdisk image:

$ # create new ramdisk image with empty kernel (/dev/null) 
$ ./android-unpackbootimg/mkbootimg.py --kernel /dev/null --ramdisk pmos-boot-huawei-leland/boot.img-huawei-leland-ramdisk.gz --cmdline 'buildvariant=user' --os_version 8.0.0 --os_patch_level 2018-06-05 -o pmos-leland.ramdisk.img

Create kernel image:

$ # kernel (with empty ramdisk via /dev/null):
$ # make sure boot.img-huawei-leland-zImage is gzipped or do it manually before mkbootimg.py
$ mkbootimg.py --kernel pmos-boot-huawei-leland/boot.img-huawei-leland-zImage.gz --ramdisk /dev/null --cmdline 'loglevel=4 coherent_pool=512K page_tracker=on slub_min_objects=12 unmovable_isolate1=2:192M,3:224M,4:256M printktimer=0xfff0a000,0x534,0x538 androidboot.selinux=enforcing buildvariant=user' --base 0x00478000 --kernel_offset 0x00008000 --ramdisk_offset 0x07b88000 --second_offset 0x00e88000 --tags_offset 0x07988000   --os_version 8.0.0 --os_patch_level 2018-12 --pagesize 2048 -o pmos-leland.kernel.img

Flash ramdisk and kernel with fastboot:

$ fastboot flash kernel pmos-leland.kernel.img 
$ fastboot flash ramdisk pmos-leland.ramdisk.img

Flash rootfs to sdcard to boot it

Additional Kernel Configuration

OASES

About

OASES stands for Open Adaptive Security Extensions. Its a Tradmark of Baidu and seems to have something todo with adaptive kernel live-patching. For now there were no disadvantages from disabling it.

Location in menu

-> Device Drivers
   -> Huawei Platform Drivers
      -> Huawei platform drivers support (HUAWEI_PLATFORM [=y])

In Order to compile the kernel OASES had to be disabled.

Additional Info

The display brightness can be set by writing a value between 0 and 9960 to /sys/class/leds/lcd_backlight0/brightness.

$ sudo -i
# echo 1024 > /sys/class/leds/lcd_backlight0/brightness

Serial debugging (UART)

To get UART working, you'll need to carefully peel off solder mask from the motherboard in TX and RX test points. Then, solder your wires to these test points shown below.

UART specs (common for most HiSilicon SoCs)

Signal level: 1.8V
Baud rate: 115200

Links

JohnBergago's Huawei_Mediapad_M5_pro_(huawei-cameron)
penn5 android kernel sources
Dil3mm4's labyrinth kernel for huawei p8 lite 2017
pmaports!239 Initial merge request (not merged)