I am happy to announce a port of Sailfish OS to Sony Xperia XZ2. It is expected that this port would allow us to add support to XZ2 compact and XZ3 in a rather simple manner. As I have a single-sim device, that's the model its ported to first. To cover all six devices in Tama family, I may need some assistance from the owners. Please open an issue in the project's main repo to discuss specific model and what's needed to make it possible.

As this announcement is made at TMO and XDA, I will keep it short and avoid repetition.

Current features, state, download links: https://github.com/sailfishos-sony-t...ster/README.md

The port was made possible thanks to the help from Sailfish porters (mal, piggz, deathmist, Mister_Magister,*vknecht, spiiroin) as well as Sony AOSP community (MartinX3, jerpelea, oshmoun,*Marijn,*kholk). And I suspect that I forgot someone, as very many contributed. Thank you very much!

I will be following on XDA and TMO. Please file issues centrally, at Github.

Edit: support is extended to cover full platform: single and dual-sim, XZ2, XZ2c, XZ3

Regarding current camera state:

Sailfish camera is reproducing AOSP9 camera behavior. Camera in AOSP9 is rather poor with kernel 4.9 series. In particular,

* Focus is slow and looks like unpredictable. So, to get sharp photo you need some luck and try several times

* Flash is out of sync with image taking. Frequently, flash is on while focussing and is off while taking photo.

As a result, to take photo, you need good light and time to make several shots.

There is a new version of blobs that promises better photos on Linux 4.14. Officially, it will be supported only with AOSP10. Maybe I can update kernels to 4.14 and use it with AOSP9, but its currently unknown. If that will fail, we will need to move the port to the new base - AOSP10.

At this moment, there are no AOSP10 stable releases and no stable Linux kernel 4.14 either. So, it will take time before we will be able even to test whether it will work for us.

So, I suggest to expect rather bad camera performance when making decision to join this port. If we manage to pull off camera update, consider it as a bonus. But don't count on it.

I am expanding a raster of devices with the images from Tama family. As mentioned above, XZ3 is
still missing mount points, hence its builds are not ready. However, as large fraction of the build if offloaded to the build servers, including generation of the images, it will be 'easy' to extend it to XZ3.

Currently, there are development builds for

- XZ2 single sim - release build is available as well and better use that
- XZ2 dual sim
- XZ2 compact single and dual

The images are available at https://thaodan.de/public/sailfishos...ges/sony/tama/ (select appropriate device image, as based on its code https://developer.sony.com/develop/o...-functionality). Thanks to Thaodan for providing server space!

I have not tested those images as mine is from earlier days. In particular, I am looking for feedback regarding

- whether images work on any of the devices. They do share the same vbmeta (see flashing instructions) which maybe a wrong assumption of mine.
- whether dual sim support works on dual-sim devices

In short, if you flashed it, please do report back. Even if its just report all is OK.

Please note these are development images. If all works as intended (boots and functionality is as for XZ2 single sim), we will make new release images. The difference is in over-the-air update support - this is available to release images only.

Builds have been extended to cover XZ3 (single sim/dual sim) as well. If you happen to try those, please report back

@rinigus Thanks, I will get an XZ3 device then and report back. Let us hope it arrives before my travel next week.

@ljo - great! while I don't have XZ3 myself, I am sure we can make it work. If there are issues with booting or flashing, just report them either here or github and we will look into it. For me, XZ2 is working great with SFOS.

As far as I can see on Sony devs channel, they work now on Android10 and Linux 4.14 support which promises to fix many camera issues. How well exactly, is hard to tell, but all posted photos do look better on new software stack. For SFOS, I will try first to get Linux 4.14 on AOSP9-based build, the current one. If we fail with it, we will have to move to AOSP10 in future. As for timeline, don't expect it soon. Probably it will take few month for Sony devs to stabilize all and, after that, we can work on it.

@ljo: I've got a report from one XZ3 user which got boot stuck on Sony logo (see XDA thread). From the description it sounds like device booted (According to LEDs), but graphics refused to start. Which means that we will probably need to debug it a bit before we make it work. Let me know when you get your device and time to hack around it. I am sure its a small issue and we will find the solution to it.

@rinigus Thanks for the heads up. I will get my device tomorrow, so I will check if I see the same behaviour to start with. And then we can take it from there.

@ljo: just don't forget to

* make all updates on stock first. As there is no Android 10 yet for Tama devices, as far as I know, you are free to accept all updates.

* check on stock that all works. Take time to do so. Otherwise you may have issues with warranty

* unlock and loose your stock camera.

* either start with Sailfish or AOSP flashing. AOSP will give you preview of what to expect on SFOS.

Depending on how it will go with SFOS, we may need to check some things on AOSP as well (hopefully not and we can do it simpler).

@rinigus After 14 large android updates that took several hours including to check functionality, I am now ready for unlock step. Unfortunately work calls, so need to continue tonight. I keep you posted then.