Wondering how the work done elsewhere could be useful to avoid dropping M10 FHD from being supported

Mez

Hi,

I own the BQ Aquaris M10 FHD (5 years now since it's been out), initially with Canonical's Ubuntu Touch, subsequently with Android 6.2 (which I'm still using to this day). I've been following the current UBPorts effort for a very long time. I never actually used UBPorts UT version since I have a daily use of the device and don't want to go through the hassle of re-configuring everything afterwards while it is working now. But I still thought that I might switch one day, probably after Anbox/Waydroid was working (I gave a bit to the crowdfunding).

Now, I've just read in Q&A 108 that it might be dropped from future supported devices when UT is ported to 20.04.

This made me remember a parallel effort from a guy (R0rtiz2) on a different forum (HTC Mania) to port it to a more recent version of Android (than 6.2) via LineageOS.
From what I read, he mostly ported it to LineageOS 15.1 which would be Android 8.1-based. Most things work, at a few exception.

https://www.htcmania.com/showthread.php?t=1560183 (probably must be registered to access)

¿QUE FUNCIONA?

Cámara.
Grabación de Videos.
DRM (L3)
Sonido/Audio.
OMX (HW).
Sensores.
Carga offline (kpoc_charger).
MTP/ADB.
Wi-Fi.
Bluetooth.
LED de notificaciones/batería.
DT2W (Doble toque encender la pantalla).
LiveDisplay.
Radio FM.
Thermal.
Gatekeeper/Keystore.
Cast (Enviar Pantalla).
GPS.
HDMI (vídeo).
Grabadora de Sonidos.
OTAs.
SoundTrigger.

¿QUE NO FUNCIONA?

Sonido por HDMI.
GPS sin conexión a internet.
OMX (HW).
Chromecast.

This made me wonder if that work could actually help save the Aquaris M10 from being scrapped when 20.04 is up and running. You never know.
Is this useless or is this something to work on?

Thank you for the amazing work.
Even if this means I will have no use of UT, I'm still looking forward to Lomiri on the desktop (I run Manjaro and I know Marius has made a repo available at some point, but I couldn't make it work).

Cheers.

Rondarius

Hi @mez
I might be wrong on some of the things that I will list below to explain why some of the old phones/tablets will be dropped:

Old kernel version: It has been mentioned that the kernel needs to be on a specific version and newer to support systemd. I don't remember what version it needs to be on to support systemd. This means that you need to upgrade the kernel. If I don't remember it wrong you need to upgrade the kernel with every release because if something breaks you'll need to fix it to procced to the next version of the kernel.

when that is done you'll need to rebuild UT to support the device, because UT supports the original kernel with the original version of android.

Probably will the drop of the 32 bit version of Ubuntu have some impact too. It will probably means that there will be no armhf version of UT.

The sum of all this is that it will take alot of work to bring the old phones with us in to the future, it is not, but close, to impossible to do this with the manpower that we have today.

the positive side is that 20.04 will be supported for 10 years, that will give us more time to work on UT.

Moem

@rondarius said in Wondering how the work done elsewhere could be useful to avoid dropping M10 FHD from being supported:

Probably will the drop of the 32 bit version of Ubuntu have some impact too. It will probably means that there will be no armhf version of UT.

... Oh.

Rondarius

@moem I agree, I have two N5 that my family is daily driving. I think that @Flohack mentoined something about it in a Q&A a while back, or was it a year back... hmm...

Moem

@rondarius said in Wondering how the work done elsewhere could be useful to avoid dropping M10 FHD from being supported:

I think that @Flohack mentoined something about it in a Q&A a while back

I found this:

UBP 5.1 is a slightly different case as it came after Canonical but it still lacks a lot of what we need. Where possible we can take devices forward to the Halium based 7.1 [thinking Nexus 5 and Oneplus One here] but if that turns out not to be possible those will also have to be dropped. If there are people in the community who want to keep the old stuff and are able to maintain it, they are welcome to do that but the core team does not have enough resources to do that.

Source

(In the meantime, I may already have found a very affordable Oneplus 3...)

A Former User

@moem

There are already 7.1 halium ports of Nexus 5 and OnePlus One.

Nexus 5 7.1 here: https://forums.ubports.com/topic/3614/lge-nexus-5-hammerhead

OPO 7.1 here: https://forums.ubports.com/topic/6012/halium-7-1-test-channel/60

Please note that these are 'in-development' test channels. Use at your own risk

Moem

@loops said in Wondering how the work done elsewhere could be useful to avoid dropping M10 FHD from being supported:

There are already 7.1 halium ports of Nexus 5 and OnePlus One.

How could I forget? I tested that one! D'oh.

But does that mean that these devices will remain supported once we reach the Ubuntu 20.04 base?

nero355

Then I guess the BQ phones from that era will also be dropped as supported devices ?

I hope I can get Ubuntu Touch running on the Xiaomi 9T I have bought a while ago and someone made a start with porting Ubuntu Touch to it!

I need my non-Android fix...

Lakotaubp

@nero355 THat issue got mentioned on Q&A 108 https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/post/ubuntu-touch-q-a-108-3778

Lakotaubp

@moem OT for here but if you can stretch to a OP5. Personnally just found it better.

dobey

@rondarius said in Wondering how the work done elsewhere could be useful to avoid dropping M10 FHD from being supported:

Probably will the drop of the 32 bit version of Ubuntu have some impact too. It will probably means that there will be no armhf version of UT.

No. Ubuntu and Debian still build 32-bit packages for both armhf and i386. The only thing Ubuntu dropped was 32-bit ISO builds, so they don't produce images any more. And I think they don't build 32-bit snaps maybe. Anything packaged as debs though should still be in the Ubuntu archives in even the latest Ubuntu releases.

So that doesn't affect how we build things.

Mez

@rondarius Thanks for your reply.
I assumed the problem was the work to bring it to a more recent version of Halium (through Android). I thought that maybe if that work is already mostly done and the subsequent effort to bring it to the common mutualized Halium base is lighter than expected, it would make things easier and maybe even manageable for an extra couple years of support.
But from your answer, it seems it's not the only block of work to undertake to keep on supporting it, and kernel updates are another big chunk that amounts to too much.

It would be sad, I kind of thought it was a 1st class citizen (in the device support) and would be supported a bit longer due to historical nostalgia (one of the few official UT devices) but of course I understand priorities are elsewhere than a 5 years old device.
I was just throwing something out there to see if this could help in reducing the work to make it happen. If not, I'll stay on Android 6.2 until the end of (its) time, I can live with that.

Rondarius

@dobey

CiberSheep

This made me wonder if that work could actually help save the Aquaris M10 from being scrapped when 20.04 is up and running. You never know.
Is this useless or is this something to work on?

I followed you train of thought and put together a list of possible trees that might come handy for you to port to Halium image.

https://forums.ubports.com/topic/6790/device-tree-list

If I understood correctly:
cm/lineage 16.0 is Halium 9.0 (preferred?)
cm/lineage 14.1 is Halium 7.1 (good)
cm/lineage 12.1 is Halium 5.1 (current?)

I put there also vegetalte (Vegeta 5G) that someone started porting long time ago