I’m planning to move towards using custom ROMs in order to have more control over what is and isn’t installed on my phone.
I’ve got an old spare S8 that I’m going to use as a testbed first to get hands on and learn a bit more. It looks like LineageOS doesn’t provide a build for that model so I’ll need to learn how to prepare one myself.
I’m no stranger to Linux - I’ve built my own kernel (and even once an LFS system) back in the day - what resources would be ideal for getting up to speed with Android?
I’d hopefully like resources that help me understand what’s going on rather than focus purely on completing one task or another.
if there are no custom roms for your device you should just give up. it requires so much resources that it’s almost tiring. If you really want to build lineage for your phone though, there’s a guide on lineage wiki to port the rom. It’s really easy, you just have to download the source code of the rom, add the source code of your phone with its proprietary blobs, then build. The hard part is wether you have the hardware to build or no. You need: 64gb of ram, ccache and zram enabled, 300gbs of storage, and an 8 cores cpu
You might be overlooking the economics in the sense that there tends to be a reason why devices aren’t supported. Oftentimes there is no sources available to build the necessary hardware support.
yeah true some OEMs take ages to release their source code, or sometimes don’t do it at all even though they’re obligated by their GPL license
A vanilla build of lineage won’t give you any of the actual advantages of a custom ROM either
Dude building Android is THAT intense??
You can build Android just fine with 16GB of RAM and 100GB of storage (I did). ccache helps with subsequent builds but isn’t required. zram helps if you’re low on RAM but isn’t required either. As for cores, I think a dual core would work just fine, it’ll just take longer. It’s all a balance of specs versus speed.
Building Android itself is actually quite easy (I think three or four commands). If your phone has received all the necessary updates, there’s a good chance all the binaries you need to pull from the original ROM are in /vendor on a separate partition.
It’s a project for sure, but individual volunteers are doing it all over the internet.