As I’ve mentioned before, development on porting the newest version of Android to our devices is underway. Last night was release day, so the work that I did was all on getting the build environment ready. Now that I’m able to build images, we now have to worry about bring-up on the actual hardware.
There are still some changes left to be pushed into the XDAndroid AOSP repositories, but most of the codebase that I’m using is already there. With every new version of Android, we need rootfs changes to add support, so that’s the next bit of code that has to be pushed (and it’s mostly completed now, waiting for me to push).
Today, I was able to get the system booted and semi-usable. After merging upstream configuration changes into the rootfs, the system entered boot animation without a hitch. Unfortunately the current version of Google Apps has one incompatible package (the Network Location provider) which caused a “bootloop”. After removing that package, it resolved the crash and the system booted normally.
There’s still no ETA on a release, of course, since a lot of work has to be done to get everything going. In short testing, I found that WiFi is no longer functional, the window manager is very slow, and as mentioned before the Google package has to be updated. There will also be a number of (expected) crashes involved with certain hardware functions, due to changes in software interfaces between the releases.
So, now that we have a running system, how about some pictures?
