[SailfishDevel] Project Halium : collaboration on common android base

Bhushan Shah bshah at kde.org
Sun Apr 16 04:03:05 UTC 2017


Hello everyone,

To introduce, I am Bhushan Shah from KDE, Plasma Mobile maintainer and in CC:
Marius Gripsgård, is founder and maintainer of project UBports, Toxip is part of
Sailfish OS Fan Club group on telegram.

Earlier it was suggested to our projects that we should collaborate with other
communities working on making GNU/Linux available to android phones, and that
idea made lot of sense to us. Below is some details about the current situation
and how this idea aims to solve it.

Currently Ubuntu Touch, SailfishOS/Mer, Plasma Mobile and others have different
android source trees and methods on how our stacks are built. There is lot of
fragmentation on the following areas,

- Android source tree
- How android init is started (droid-hal-init vs lxc container vs chroot etc..)
- How images are flashed to device, (flash cm first v/s flash system directly)
- ...

But ideally these parts wouldn’t need to be separate, because we all have the
same goal in the end. Each OS make use of android binary drivers using projects
like libhybris, ofono, libcamera, audioflinger glue etc.

Instead of being fragmented and everyone having to do the same job in a
different way we have come up with idea to have a common base for all the OSs.
The common base would include Linux kernel + Android HAL + libhybris shared
between all the OSs. Less fragmentation would mean more common resources and
would be a huge boon for porting efforts. This kind of approach would have the
following benefits,

- Shared porting effort, port once and use everywhere
- More streamlined HAL
- Makes it easier for other distributions to run on mobile devices
- Common ground for communication between the different projects

Currently this project idea is codenamed Halium. Overall idea for the project is
drafted at the https://tinyurl.com/halium, and our communication channels are at
matrix channel #halium:disroot.org or at IRC channel #halium at freenode or at
telegram group https://t.me/halium. (All of these communication channels are
bridged together, so you can choose whatever suits the best for you).

If you’re interested in this kind of collaboration or have any comments or
questions, please join one of our communications channels or reply to this
message. We will be happy to answer to any kind of questions.

We are looking forward to your feedback and collaboration.
The Halium team

-- 
Bhushan Shah
http://blog.bshah.in
IRC Nick : bshah on Freenode
GPG key fingerprint : 0AAC 775B B643 7A8D 9AF7 A3AC FE07 8411 7FBC E11D
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