Originally Posted by smatkovi

i encountered a bug, the accelerometer stopped working for me with the experimental kernel

Originally Posted by TheKit

I got pretty much inspired by https://jolla.comes.today/jolla-tablet-on-taobao-china/ article and firmware from http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=96474. In a nutshell, official Jolla Tablet is a device based around Intel Atom Z3735F SoC (Bay Trail) and can work both with Sailfish OS and Android (by the way, Android device tree it's based on is called "anzhen4_mrd8_w").

There have been a lot of cheap Chinese tablet using the same SoC, and usually they come with Android/Windows dualboot. So what's preventing us from running Sailfish OS on them? Android firmware can often be easily ported between such devices, but kernel is device-specific, so custom ROM makers just use the stock kernel from their device unmodified.

For Sailfish OS, we can't, since systemd requires some kernel options which are most of time turned off in Android kernels. Enabling them and recompiling kernel would be easy if Chinese manufacturers didn't violate GPL and actually provided kernel sources, but that's not the case. Thankfully, since most of hardware is similar, it's possible to base custom kernel on other device source.

I have Sailfish OS running on Onda V820w tablet. It's not perfect yet, but the hardware itself (touchscreen, audio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, front and back cameras) works. Many thanks to Stskeeps for providing modules folders which were missing from Jolla Tablet kernel sources. The biggest problem was getting kernel working with camera sensors. Even though the needed drivers are present, PMIC regs and GPIO pin meanings turned out to be different. Just a few values to change, but it was very troublesome to debug and I had to disassemble Onda stock Android kernel to understand what's wrong.

Below is a guide to installing Sailfish OS on Onda V820w (tested with V3, see serial number to understand what revision is yours if you happen to have it). Hope community will be interested in running Sailfish OS on other similar devices and we can have more supported. I'm happy to help with what I can either here or at #sailfishos-porters on IRC.



Update: automatic installer (all data is going to be erased!) image for ONDA V820W V3: https://mega.nz/#!8FZRiBwB!FBBD8CUMa...Qp713VqT-FoAhM. Unpack it to the root of FAT32 formatted USB drive and boot tablet from USB drive.

Originally Posted by explit

How do you think are the chances to get your image running on another Baytrail tablet Medion Lifetab S10366?
Its also based on anzhen Android Device Tree.

Here is my post about it:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=99355

Thanks

Originally Posted by TheKit

I think the way it runs on ONDA is more hacky and complicated than it probably needs to be for Medion, if it's based on same device tree. Onda has 32-bit UEFI firmware and no kernel source code available from vendor, so basically I adapted Jolla Tablet kernel tree for it and used GRUB2 bootloader to boot 64-bit kernel with 32-bit UEFI (32-bit kernel can be also used in theory, but there is weird bug with kernel panic on starting PulseAudio).

Since Medion is Germany-based, can you request GPL kernel source code from them? It's either not present on their website or I couldn't find it.

Originally Posted by TheKit

I think the way it runs on ONDA is more hacky and complicated than it probably needs to be for Medion, if it's based on same device tree. Onda has 32-bit UEFI firmware and no kernel source code available from vendor, so basically I adapted Jolla Tablet kernel tree for it and used GRUB2 bootloader to boot 64-bit kernel with 32-bit UEFI (32-bit kernel can be also used in theory, but there is weird bug with kernel panic on starting PulseAudio).

Since Medion is Germany-based, can you request GPL kernel source code from them? It's either not present on their website or I couldn't find it.