This update is the eleventh in a series of regular updates on the state of the project.
Only changes that have been accepted and merged in Mobile NixOS are chronicled here. There’s always more work currently in-progress.
Notable changes
During the month 14 pull requests were merged.
Some interesting changes were made during the month, let’s look at some of them.
Re-done kernel builder ergonomics
The goal of this change is to make the kernel derivations as lean as possible, relying on the builder, rather than relying on copy-pasting common patterns around.
This is a change that was needed since the project was started. Though, it could not have happened much earlier than this late in the project. This is because multiple different quirky kernels needed to exist to properly show what needed to be abstracted.
With this, all common patterns for quirks have been identified and put behind flags. Those flags are described in Notes about the kernel builder.
End-users shouldn’t see any difference, this will help people who make ports.
Compile kernels only once
While testing the previous change, it was observed by @danielfullmer that kernel compilation happened twice for some devices.
This was not a regression. Though looking at things trying to find problems you are bound to see the existing flaws!
This was worked around by
doing everything in one make invocation. The end-result is that some kernel
builds will finish twice as quickly!
Pinephone Modem support improvements
Simply put, the modem has been verified to work with LTE data.
With that said, there’s more to it. End-users shouldn’t have to care about a
deeply-rooted /sys fs path to turn the modem off or on. This is why the
modem-control service has been added. It mirrors the modem’s state using
bindsTo and wantedBy.
With this service, the modem is better integrated with systemd, but more
importantly the user can stop and start it using systemctl, rather than to
dig for a particular less user-friendly path.
Calls and SMS will be tested at a later point in time. Though it is expected that calls will require some work for the audio to work properly (a known upstream issue).