This week I’ve spent most of my time getting Gentoo musl to run on my PinePhone Pro and packaging mauikit apps. I have also done some minor testing on KDE applications and some other miscellaneous things.<\/p>\n
In my proposal I had initially planned on porting KDE applications and making them build on Gentoo musl the following two weeks, and then making sure test suites run the week following that. But I’ve already gotten kde-apps-meta installed and the programs are working well for the most part. Though I haven’t enabled every use flag for the KDE apps and I haven’t ran every test suite so there’s definitely work to do left, just not 3 weeks work. So instead I asked Sam if I could spend some time working on getting Gentoo musl to run on my PinePhone Pro with Plasma Mobile as a side project.
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Starting with the PinePhone. The Gentoo install itself was pretty smooth and I didn’t run into any major issues. But I really got stuck on some other more low level and non-Gentoo bits.
\nThe first issue I ran into was when I installed a new kernel onto it. Apparently a single developer called Megi does most of the PPP kernel development so I installed his kernel. Confusingly his development branch is called “orange-pi-5.x” and it took me some time figuring that out :D. Anyways, the compilation itself was straight forward, and the defconfig _almost_ worked well. I stole the bootloader configuration from PostmarketOS, rsync:ed the kernel + dtbs, and then changed some relevant parts in the bootloader config. Sadly the phone did not boot, and there was no output to be seen on the screen :\/.
\nAfter reading the wiki I found out that I could connect via serial through the headphone jack. I used an RS232-to-USB adapter and soldered it onto the internal wires of a 3.5mm cable. For output this did work, but when connecting TX to also get input, the output just got messed up and I couldn’t read it. I tried to debug this and also seeked help from others, but ultimately couldn’t get it to work. Luckily the only thing I needed was output because I saw in the bootlog that EFI stub was missing from the kernel. Enabling that and generating an initramfs made the phone boot!<\/p>\n
Then I started emerging some packages, and even though I had the charger plugged in, the phone completely discharged after a while. After that the phone did not want to boot and I tried all kinds of things, like booting from SD card, reflashing bootloader, trying different cables and nothing worked … It turned out that the bootloader (Tow-boot) had a bug that made the phone not charge after the battery as emptied, and I needed to boot it into a special mode holding a button with a sim card opener.<\/p>\n
After that I set up distcc with cross compilation, and there came the second issue. “__aarch64_cas4_sync undefined symbol”. I asked Sam and he said it probably was a distcc issue. Because of me not wanting to run into this again I tried the aarch64-gentoo-linux-musl-emerge wrapper instead. This worked for the most part, but I had trouble with copying over my phones configuration to \/usr\/…\/etc\/portage.
\nI then learned about the ROOT, SYSROOT, and PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT variables. Toghether with sshfs I could easily emerge packages for the phone on my PC without using something slow like qemu-user, nice!
\nI emerged a lot of packages like this and noticed that the program dispatch-conf did not honour the variables. This was easy to fix and I PR:ed it here https:\/\/github.com\/gentoo\/portage\/pull\/881.<\/p>\n
I have also created a lot of ebuilds for Mauikit apps, these are cross platform KDE applications that look great on smaller devices like phones. https:\/\/github.com\/gentoo\/kde\/pull\/910\/commits. They also work great on my PC.<\/p>\n
All in all I’ve spent most my time this week working on the PinePhone, and the two following weeks I’ll do a lot of testing for the KDE applications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week I’ve spent most of my time getting Gentoo musl to run on my PinePhone Pro and packaging mauikit apps. I have also done some minor testing on KDE applications and some other miscellaneous things. In my proposal I … Continue reading