Halium is an Open Source Project Working Towards a Common Base for Non-Android Mobile Operating Systems

[Posted April 18, 2017 by ris]

The xda-developers blog looks at Project Halium. "This open-source project is trying to pool developers from Ubuntu Touch ports, Sailfish OS community developers, the open webOS Lune OS project, and KDE Plasma Mobile contributors, among other developers (Jolla, we suspect) to put an end to the fragmentation seen in their respective project’s lower-level base. Currently, Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS/Mer, Plasma Mobile, and others use different Android source trees and methods for differently-built stacks. This leads to a lot of fragmentation among the most popular non-Android, GNU/Linux-based mobile OS projects in their use of the Android source tree, how the Android init is started, and how images are flashed to the device. Many of these projects essentially do the same job, but in a different way." The goal of Halium is to work towards a common Linux base, which can be used by all of these different projects.

Halium is an Open Source Project Working Towards a Common Base for Non-Android Mobile Operating Systems

Posted Apr 18, 2017 22:31 UTC (Tue) by hadess (subscriber, #24252) [Link] (4 responses)

This is a great way for non-Android Linux to gain the hardware support it deserves on the targeted devices. I hope this effort will make the project a gateway towards "distro" style Linux getting support for those and less duplication of efforts, eventually resulting in upstreamed drivers.

Halium is an Open Source Project Working Towards a Common Base for Non-Android Mobile Operating Systems

Posted Apr 19, 2017 2:22 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

AFAIK, none of the previous efforts to use Android hardware support for GNU/Linux distributions resulted in mainline Linux/etc drivers. FirefoxOS, Ubuntu Phone, Plasma Mobile, Shashlik etc all stuck with their Android blobs.

The only efforts towards mainline I've seen have been from OpenMoko/Maemo/N900 fans, developers related to the Replicant project and from Sony's open devices program.

I do hope Halium switch focus to reverse engineering and mainlining but it sounds like they will stick to Android blobs and libhybris.

Halium is an Open Source Project Working Towards a Common Base for Non-Android Mobile Operating Systems

Posted Apr 19, 2017 6:46 UTC (Wed) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]

Also some "running mobile OS on mainline kernel" work has come from the http://www.android-x86.org/ project and the mainline effort for nexus 7 at https://lwn.net/Articles/680109/ . Both are based on android, which really not surprising. If you want to work on drivers, you want a stable and working UI. For the "not android" projects, creating a new UI has been their priority, and working on the drivers at the same time would be a disaster where neither drivers or UI would progress.

Halium is an Open Source Project Working Towards a Common Base for Non-Android Mobile Operating Systems

Posted Apr 19, 2017 11:23 UTC (Wed) by kloczek (guest, #6391) [Link] (1 responses)

Again NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome?

Halium is an Open Source Project Working Towards a Common Base for Non-Android Mobile Operating Systems

Posted Apr 19, 2017 12:40 UTC (Wed) by sebas (guest, #51660) [Link]

Could you elaborate?

(Halium is about collaboration, not original development. I don't see how NIH applies here.)