lets talk about the phasing out of haluim

[developerbayman]

@grenudi thanks man! ...and cool yeah i was sitting there and im like ? i wonder?? ...so cool i dont mind being late to the party lol

[grenudi]

grenudi said:

And more over, if it works, it should work vise-versa, giving a temporary foot hold for all those postmarketos devices that already run mainline kernel but lack camera, gps, etc, bringing those players back to HALium contribution

joining back with upstream communities on this would be amazing but again, all pure speculation on my part, though very worth investigating further, in my opinion.

[grenudi]

grenudi said:

joining back with upstream communities on this would be amazing but again, all pure speculation on my part, though very worth investigating further, in my opinion.

A bucket of cold water from AI :

Is the "Sequential Stripping" or "Reverse Hybrid" Possible?

In a word: No. The transition between Halium and Mainline Linux is not a gentle slope; it is a steep cliff.

Here is the technical reasoning why you cannot easily mix the two:

The Kernel Version Mismatch: Halium relies on a tool called libhybris. This tool allows a standard Linux operating system to talk to the phone's proprietary Android hardware drivers (known as "blobs"). The fatal flaw is that these closed-source blobs were compiled by the manufacturer for a very specific, older Android kernel (e.g., Linux 3.18 or 4.14). Mainline Linux projects (like postmarketOS) use modern kernels (e.g., Linux 6.x).

API/ABI Breakage: If you try the "reverse" approach—putting Halium on a mainline kernel just to make the camera work—the proprietary camera blob will crash. It expects to talk to old Android-specific kernel interfaces (like ashmem or older versions of the Binder IPC) that either do not exist or have been drastically changed in the mainline Linux kernel. Because the blob is closed-source, you cannot recompile it to understand the new kernel.

It's All or Nothing: You cannot "sequentially strip" Halium while running the old Android kernel, because the end goal is to replace the kernel itself. As soon as you swap the old Android kernel for a mainline kernel, every single proprietary Halium driver breaks simultaneously.

To get off Halium, developers must painstakingly reverse-engineer the hardware and write brand new, open-source drivers directly into the mainline kernel. There is no shortcut.

[developerbayman]

@grenudi totally what im proposing total rewrite from the ground up ....ill need to hit the books

[grenudi]

@developerbayman I got spoiled with those AI's Yes, hitting those books would be much more productive than me consulting LLMS over shoulder

[developerbayman]

@grenudi lol ill take it though i started programming when i was nine i am 43 now ...so for most of my life i had to bang my head on syntax ...now i can simply stop the headache and run it through a LLM ...HOWEVER... it is NOT a END all beat all .....if your not careful things can go off the rails very quickly or you will get garbage ......but thank god long gone are the days of "iv been stuck on why this function hasnt worked for the last six months!" ....thank god!!! and good riddance!!

[kugiigi]

@grenudi Which projects ditch halium?

[developerbayman]

@kugiigi im just guessing but i would think like pixels and other phones where the drivers are not on lock ...i dont actually know tho

[kugiigi]

@developerbayman I only know Droidian and UT. I don't know any other projects that use Halium and has actual daily driver users.

postmarketOS has always been about mainlining mobile devices so it's not that.

[developerbayman]

@kugiigi yeah i dont know either ....to bad we couldnt simply design our own phone specifically for the project like midrange ....actually didnt they do that already? ...i know eventually im working off and on on porting UT to the orange pi 5 thing will become more interesting at that point i think ...one distro at a time i suppose lol