Is Ubuntu Touch OTA-2 Focal incompatible with the Fairphone 2?

domubpkm

Smartphones 'maintained' / 'promoted' or not, it's always a race against time so that UT does not get left behind by the real world. UT is not in tune with the current technological world and is at least 2 years behind in my opinion and it's a race that must be very frustrating for all developers (without them no UT so a big thank you ) very difficult to catch up and even so that it does not widen more. Well despite that, I still really like UT but it has to be functional daily in today's real world.

arubislander

@Keneda said in Is Ubuntu Touch OTA-2 Focal incompatible with the Fairphone 2?:

My point is the FP4, wich is a promoted device, will, if mainlined, not suffer end of support due to deprecated kernel, like majority of the Xenial ones are suffuring now.

The old kernels in the Android devices are a challenge, for sure. But not an insurmountable one, as has been shown in the effort to bring Focal the OP1. Sure it is a whole lot of work (a HUGE thank you to @TheVancedGamer for undertaking it!!), but what is slowing the effort the most is contributors, not kernel version.

Continued support also is not necessarily easier for mainlined, as development on the PinePhone has shown. Newer kernels also introduce new bugs. Support for older or less common hardware deteriorates or gets dropped.

As newer Fairphone models are introduced, hopefully also with UT support, choices will have to be made if, and how long, the limited resources will continue to be allocated to older models, mainlined or not.
The only way continued support for any device can be guaranteed is a large enough maintainer base.

Keneda

@arubislander said in Is Ubuntu Touch OTA-2 Focal incompatible with the Fairphone 2?:

But not an insurmountable one, as has been shown in the effort to bring Focal the OP1

Yes, like said in the link I gave in a previous post here, it is possible to bring focal to android 9 devices with a huge work.
By the way, kernel is 3.4.113 on both OPO and FP2.

Anyway, with the "good" kernel, it's simpler.

Let's hope someone step on for doing this huge amount of work for the sake of FP2 UT users.

Also, as I understood what makes Pinephones hard to port is because their ports are not built on halium, unlike any android device mainlined kernel or not.

arubislander

@Keneda said in Is Ubuntu Touch OTA-2 Focal incompatible with the Fairphone 2?:

Also, as I understood what makes Pinephones hard to port is because their ports are not built on halium, unlike any android device mainlined or not.

The whole point of a mainlined Android device would be exactly that Halium would no longer be needed, presenting it with the similar challenges as the Pine64 devices and RPi's, which are mainline devices.

Keneda

@arubislander
Correct me if I'm wrong but mainlining and android device like FP4 is including vendor blobs drivers in a mainline branch of linux kernel, so that it's not needed to depend on vendor custom kernel right ?

Does that necessarily also mean you can't no longer use the halium way if Fairphone release some FPOS including this mainlined linux kernel ?

arubislander

@Keneda It probably doesn't mean you can't use Halium, but I am not sure what advantage it brings to continue using Halium, it being a hardware abstraction layer between the OS and the hardware drivers, if all the relevant drivers would already be supported by kernel itself.

Some relevant posts from the FP Forums:
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/official-mainline-kernel-support-for-fp4-planned/76741/10
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/official-mainline-kernel-support-for-fp4-planned/76741/19

Also note that mainlining drivers for the latest FP device is a multi year effort, and is being done part-time. Chances are good that it will not be completed before a new device is released, and then attention might shift to that device instead (as you see, another game of catch-up).

Keneda

@arubislander said in Is Ubuntu Touch OTA-2 Focal incompatible with the Fairphone 2?:

but I am not sure what advantage it brings to continue using Halium

Like you said yourself, porting UT to pinephone is an uncharted challenge, still ongoing for years, whereas porting in the halium way is a known territory.

Some relevant posts from the FP Forums

Yes, I gave link to this topic in my previous post ^^

And as you can read from the FF employee that work on mainlining FP4, it'll help to maintain android rom on it also, so as one Fairphone goal is to make their device last the longer possible, we can hope the soon to be released Fairphone 5 not to kill mainlining effort for the 4.

Anyway, let's hope the port for Pinephone reach a 100% state and then it can be adapted quickly for any mainlined kernel android device, making halium irrelevant for those.

arubislander

@Keneda said in Is Ubuntu Touch OTA-2 Focal incompatible with the Fairphone 2?:

what makes Pinephones hard to port is because their ports are not built on halium

What makes the Pinephones hard to port was mostly the lack of drivers for the hardware. As the hardware becomes better supported, then the port works better, see Focal on RPi 4, for instance. If drivers would be mainlined, then it would not be necessary to use Halium to communicate with them.

My point however, is that even such support is not 'free'. If a piece of hardware is not widely used, maintenance for it could potentially still fall on the shoulder of a team of one. And unless support is financed by the hardware vendor, that one could become none at any time unexpectedly.

Luksus

I started work on FP2 kernel for focal, multiple times, but never got it to a usable state. Iirc, I got it booting one time, but in this state, it was missing lots of needed configs, for getting UT up with UI and other needed stuff.

Keneda

@Luksus
Did you see @peat_psuwit post where he says he patched kernel to run plasma mobile, wich needs systemd, on a FP2 ?

Edit : https://forums.ubports.com/topic/8386/no-new-stuff-for-xenial-but-what-about-old-new-stuff/12?_=1691470274847

TheVancedGamer

y'all need focal for FP2?

there

Keneda

@TheVancedGamer

You mean you are actually doing the port ?
This image is... You adapting the kernel ?

TheVancedGamer

@Keneda yes and yes

Keneda

@TheVancedGamer
Maybe you could get in touch with @Luksus and @peat_psuwit ?
The more the crazies, the more the funny

Opolork

Am I correct to I presume my 16.04 version of UT is supported until Apr-2026? By then my FP2 will be about obsolete anyway and I'll likely need a newer smartphone.

arubislander

@Opolork no, 16.04 has already gone out of support. The ESR offering of Canonical sadly did not cover the ARM architecture for 16.04. It does for 20.04 on the other hand.

Opolork

@arubislander

Damn.

So effectively, I'm using an unsecure OS on my FP2?

arubislander

@Opolork said in Is Ubuntu Touch OTA-2 Focal incompatible with the Fairphone 2?:

So effectively, I'm using an unsecure OS on my FP2?

No, you are using an unsupported OS. That does not mean it is insecure. It does mean it will not get any more security updates.
But not all vulnerabilities are equally exploitable. Also, UT's read-only file system and confined application runtime environment go a long way into protecting you additionally. Add to that fact that there are no services running on the device out-of-the box that can be connected to remotely (if you are concerned with security, you should disable ssh on your device, even if on a supported OS), then I would say, realistically, you are probably as safe as you would be on 20.04.

The main reason to stop using 16.04 would be lack of support for newer apps. But we haven't quite gotten there as yet.

Opolork

@arubislander said in Is Ubuntu Touch OTA-2 Focal incompatible with the Fairphone 2?:

disable ssh on your device

Thanks for the advice/info.

How would I disable SSH?

domubpkm

@Opolork You can use UT TT : System / SSH parameters.
It seems for me SSH is reactivated at every start of my Volla. To be checked.