The Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 (msm8916) is a SoC that was used in many smartphones and
tablets around 2015. It is the most mature "aftermarket" platform postmarketOS can offer
at the time of writing. Many of the supported devices are quite usable and have
most of the expected features like phone calls and mobile data working.
The talk goes over some of the most important challenges that we have faced while
supporting those devices and describes the ways in which we have solved them.
Apart from the Linux kernel, we focus on various other tools and projects like
lk2nd - a shim bootloader that prepares the environment for booting Linux and
hides some device-specific quirks from the kernel. It also unifies the boot and
installation process on all devices.
We also have other tools and resources to make porting easier. Those include
various documentation or even a fully automated display driver generator
that helps with the fact that each display requires unique initialization.