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Installing GNU/Linux on my Samsung S7

April 6th, 2020

I want to do something useful with my old Samsung S7. Previously I’ve tried LineageOS, and while it works OK, it wasn’t as stable as the stock Samsung ROM and you still end up installing a lot of proprietary apps on it by necessity. I’d much rather run a proper GNU/Linux distro on it. This post is documenting my efforts at doing that, with some minor success.

A failed mainling

My first attempt was to use PostmarketOS. This is a proper free/libre distribution in that it doesn’t rely on any Android blobs for hardware access. Which is great if your SoC/GPU/modem/etc. has mainline Linux support. But I have the European S7 which contains the Samsung Exynos 8890 SoC, for which the only publicly available source code is the Android 3.18 kernel dump. For graphics this means you’re stuck with an unaccelerated framebuffer only which is a non-starter for any modern GUI.

The solution to this would be to update the Samsung provided kernel to a more recent version of Linux, which has free drivers for the Mali GPU, etc. I tried rebasing their code on a slightly more recent 4.4 kernel but once I looked into the SoC’s PCIe and USB drivers I realised how enormous the task was and gave up. Sadly unless Samsung do the work themselves or even just release the 8890 datasheet this device is never going to run anything later than 3.18.

Halium

Halium is an interesting project for devices stuck in this situation. Drivers for Android devices are usually split between a minimal GPL’d kernel driver and a proprietary userspace blob (HAL). Halium allows you to run the userspace blobs inside a LXC container, using a minimal Android system.img without any of the UI level components. Hybris then allows you to link to and call the Android libraries from normal Linux programs linked against glibc. It’s the basis of UBPorts and Plasma Mobile.

There’s already some progress getting Halium to run on the S7. I picked this up and got it to the point where it can run GNOME under X11.

Debugging in the initrd

The Halium boot.img contains a very useful init-script which is great for debugging. You can configure it enable the USB network device and then start a telnet server inside the initrd and wait for you to connect before it continues booting. This lets you chroot into the target filesystem, poke around, and most importantly read /proc/last_kmesg to debug kernel panics. Without this I would have given up pretty quickly, as will no serial port or other debug output there’s little feedback when something goes wrong.

The S7 has an annoying bug where the USB Ethernet MAC address is all zeros. I’ve put a patch for that here.

Systemd-journald hangs the system

The default Halium rootfs image hangs very early in boot. On the GitHub issue someone noticed this was caused by journald and it would boot a bit further if you stop this from running. You can do this with systemctl mask systemd-journald.service.

The problem here is caused by the max77854_fuelgauge battery driver not implementing some properties to read its status from /proc. Journald gets stuck in a loop of polling these files and locks up the system. Why is journald trying to read battery information? No idea, but it’s trivial to fix this behaviour with a patch to the kernel.

Disable Android “paranoid network”

Android has some patches to disable all network access unless the user is a member of some specific group. This is useless for a normal Linux userland so disable it in the defconfig.

Replacing the Halium system image with Debian

After this we can boot up into the default Halium rootfs which is based on Ubuntu 16.04. The LXC Android container boots, loads all the firmware, and WiFi is working but not much else. I thought about trying some other stock Halium rootfs like Plasma Mobile or UBPorts, but really I’d rather set my phone up like a regular computer so I used debootstrap to install a minimal Debian filesystem in the /data partition on the phone. My home directory is on a 64GB microSD card so I can safely blat the OS and reinstall. This requires tweaking the boot script in the initrd because Halium normally loopback mounts a rootfs image inside /data and then does a switch_root into that, but now we have the OS installed directly in /data.

Sadly this just hangs on boot. Debugging with the initrd telnet interface, systemd is stuck unable to start any processes. Turns out this is because systemd 245 depends on the “ambient capabilities” feature which isn’t present in the 3.18 kernel. Google have backported this to the Android 3.18 series so we can just apply that patch on the Samsung kernel.

This gets us a bit further and then the kernel panics while starting udevd.

<0>[  132.035960]  [5:         v4l_id:  787] Call trace:
&lt;0>[  132.035979]  [5:         v4l_id:  787] [<ffffffc0000ec328>] dump_backtrace+0x0/0x144
&lt;0>[  132.035990]  [5:         v4l_id:  787] [<ffffffc0000ec5ec>] die+0x140/0x228
&lt;0>[  132.036009]  [5:         v4l_id:  787] [<ffffffc0000f82b8>] __do_kernel_fault+0xb4/0xd8
&lt;0>[  132.036019]  [5:         v4l_id:  787] [<ffffffc0000f858c>] do_page_fault+0x2b0/0x2fc
&lt;0>[  132.036029]  [5:         v4l_id:  787] [<ffffffc0000f86c0>] do_translation_fault+0xe8/0x150
&lt;0>[  132.036039]  [5:         v4l_id:  787] [<ffffffc0000e5268>] do_mem_abort+0x38/0xa4
&lt;0>[  132.036050]  [5:         v4l_id:  787] [<ffffffc0000e7d70>] el1_da+0x20/0x78
&lt;0>[  132.036065]  [5:         v4l_id:  787] [<ffffffc00067d00c>] v4l_querycap+0x28/0x50
&lt;0>[  132.036076]  [5:         v4l_id:  787] [<ffffffc000680eb4>] __video_do_ioctl+0x164/0x254
&lt;0>[  132.036085]  [5:         v4l_id:  787] [<ffffffc000681250>] video_usercopy+0x2ac/0x504
&lt;0>[  132.036094]  [5:         v4l_id:  787] [<ffffffc0006814b8>] video_ioctl2+0x10/0x1c
&lt;0>[  132.036103]  [5:         v4l_id:  787] [<ffffffc00067bd3c>] v4l2_ioctl+0x78/0x130
&lt;0>[  132.036117]  [5:         v4l_id:  787] [<ffffffc00068c468>] do_video_ioctl+0xfd8/0x1d04
&lt;0>[  132.036128]  [5:         v4l_id:  787] [<ffffffc00068d1ec>] v4l2_compat_ioctl32+0x58/0xb4
&lt;0>[  132.036142]  [5:         v4l_id:  787] [<ffffffc000230bc8>] compat_SyS_ioctl+0x10c/0x1250
</ffffffc000230bc8></ffffffc00068d1ec></ffffffc00068c468></ffffffc00067bd3c></ffffffc0006814b8></ffffffc000681250></ffffffc000680eb4></ffffffc00067d00c></ffffffc0000e7d70></ffffffc0000e5268></ffffffc0000f86c0></ffffffc0000f858c></ffffffc0000f82b8></ffffffc0000ec5ec></ffffffc0000ec328>

This is in some ioctls for the camera sensor driver. I think the problem here is that udev is enumerating the devices before the Android HAL blobs have had a chance to do their initialisation. I sprinkled some random NULL checks and it does crash anymore but I’m not really happy with this so haven’t pushed the patch.

Halium LXC container

Next I copied all of the lxc-android repository onto the device, as well as the Android system.img from the default Halium install. This contains all the scripts to start the LXC Android container. The LXC config file in the repository is from an older version of LXC than current Debian unstable. It’s easy to upgrade in-place with lxc-update-config -c /var/lib/lxc/android/config.

Enable the services that mount the Android filesystems:

systemctl enable android-mount.service
systemctl enable system.mount

Then reboot and check the Android side started up with /system/bin/logcat. This should load all the firmware blobs and enable the WiFi interface.

Hybris tests and udev permission problems

Hybris comes with a bunch of useful test programs for checking the various Android wrappers like GLES, sound, camera, etc. are working. Unfortunately they all failed with some cryptic error messages:

nick@samsung:~$ test_glesv2 
library "libgui.so" wasn't loaded and RTLD_NOLOAD prevented it
ERROR: The DDK is not compatible with any of the Mali GPUs on the system.
The DDK was built for 0x880 r2p0 status range [0..15], but none of the GPUs matched:
test_glesv2: ../../tests/test_glesv2.c:113: main: Assertion `eglGetError() == EGL_SUCCESS' failed.
Aborted

A quick check in Android’s logcat reveals a lot of failures to open devices:

03-21 08:15:14.350     0  1574 D libEGL  : failed to load libgui: dlopen failed: 
03-21 08:15:14.356     0  1574 D libEGL  : loaded /vendor/lib/egl/libGLES_mali.so
03-21 08:15:14.368     0  1574 E ion     : open /dev/ion failed!
03-21 08:15:14.368     0  1574 E gralloc : /dev/graphics/fb0 Open fail
03-21 08:15:14.368     0  1574 E gralloc : Fail to init framebuffer
03-21 08:15:14.368     0  1574 E ion     : open /dev/ion failed!
03-21 08:15:14.368     0  1574 W libEGL  : eglInitialize(0xf786da60) failed (EGL_NOT_INITIALIZED)

This looks like a simple permission problem where the permissions on the device files are not set up the way Android expects. Simply following the Halium documentation and generating the udev rules file for the device then rebooting fixes this. Patch here.

Now we get a little bit further and test_hwcomposer crashes inside some EGL initialisation function. I don’t really understand what’s going on but it seems to be some mismatch between the gralloc version libhybris is using and the gralloc version used by the Samsung blobs. (Gralloc is Android’s graphics memory allocation layer.) I hacked around this by forcing hybris to skip the check for gralloc v1. I’m not very happy about this so I’ll perhaps revisit it later.

UPDATE: better fix here: libhybris/libhybris#446.

And now all graphics, lights, and vibrator tests all work! I couldn’t immediately get camera and sound working, but I didn’t try very hard.

Wayland, X11, GNOME

I’ve been using GNOME3 on my desktop quite happily for a while now and I’d like to run it on my phone too. The launcher is touch friendly-ish and Purism have done a lot of work porting the various GNOME apps to a mobile form-factor using libhandy.

Ideally I’d run the Wayland variant of Mutter because both Wayland and the Android graphics stack are based on GLES and this should get us hardware accelearation for the UI. Unfortunately this is a bit of a non-starter as the Mutter Wayland backend is tied to DRM which Android kernels don’t support. So we’re stuck with X11 or using a different compositor entirely.

Thankfully there’s the xf86-video-hwcomposer project that provides an X driver using Android’s hwcomposer and libhybris. This provides hardware acceleration on the X server side but any client side drawing is unaccelerated and uses Mesa’s llvmpipe software fallback.

And finally…

There’s really nothing like the triumphant feeling of doing apt install emacs on your phone followed by the despair of discovering there’s no way to press those C- and M- meta keys.

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Unlocking Encrypted Home Partition on Login

September 22nd, 2019

I recently did a new Debian install on my laptop after upgrading the NVMe and this time round I set up LUKS disk encryption for my /home partition. I want this to be as hassle-free as possible, which means having the partition automatically unlocked and mounted when I log in, rather than having to type a separate password on boot.

It’s not as straightforward as you might think, I guess because everyone’s setup and requirements are a little different. So I’ll write my notes here in case it’s useful to someone else. I’m doing this on Debian, but I cribbed a lot of it from the excellent Arch wiki.

When first setting up the encrypted partition make sure that the disk password is the same as your login password. This will be important later.

The file /etc/crypttab is read early in boot by systemd (see its crypttab map page). Systemd then calls cryptsetup on each entry in this file to unlock the partition. This is where the boot time password prompt that we want to get rid of comes from. Simply add noauto to options list at the end and systemd will skip it:

nvme0n1p3_crypt UUID=XXXX-XXXX none luks,discard,noauto

Also edit /etc/fstab to comment out or remove the entry for /home: we’ll be using pam_mount to do this directly.

sudo apt install libpam-mount

This is a PAM plugin that can mount arbitrary filesystems whenever a user logs in and unmount them when they log out. We can also use it to unlock and encrypted partition using the user’s password before mounting. This is why the login password and the disk password must be the same. Open /etc/security/pam_mount.conf.xml and add these lines to it:

<volume user="nick" fstype="crypt" path="/dev/nvme0n1p3"                        
        mountpoint="nvme0n1p3_crypt" />                                         
 
<volume user="nick" fstype="auto" path="/dev/mapper/nvme0n1p3_crypt"            
        mountpoint="/home" options="defaults,relatime,discard" />                       
 
<cryptmount>cryptsetup open --allow-discards %(VOLUME) %(MNTPT)</cryptmount>    
<cryptumount>cryptsetup close %(MNTPT)</cryptumount>

We need to add two <volume> entries. The first with fstype="crypt" unlocks the physical LUKS partition (/dev/nvme0n1p3) and creates a new volume that we can mount as a normal filesystem (/dev/mapper/nvme0n1p3_crypt). Obviously change the user name and physical device path to match your system.

The <cryptmount> and <cryptumount> entries tell pam_mount how to open and close the encrypted partition when fstype="crypt". Note that I’ve added the --allow-discard option here which enables the SSD TRIM command to reduce wear on the disk, but has some security implications which you might want to read up on.

Reboot and check everything works. If you have problems try adding:

<debug enable="1" />

to pam_mount.conf.xml and log in on a text console. This will print some diagnostic messages.

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Linus Torvalds

July 13th, 2019

I finally saw Linus Torvalds live! I think, however, reading his online rants is considerably more interesting than watching a staged conversation. 🙃

Making Emacs GUD Usable

June 9th, 2019

Emacs provides a wrapper for various debuggers including GDB called the Grand Unified Debugger (GUD). I’ve tried it in the past but always run into lots of minor annoyances with the UI so I just use command line GDB instead. But recently I’ve being trying to adopt a more “Emacs native” workflow, including using EShell instead of a separate terminal window for Bash, Magit instead of command line git, ERC for IRC, etc. So let’s see if we can fix these GUD problems…

Basic configuration

(setq gdb-many-windows t
      gdb-use-separate-io-buffer t)

The default mode of GUD just creates a single window with the the normal GDB terminal. This doesn’t seem to offer much over running GDB directly. The “many windows” mode splits the screen into six separate windows showing the current source file, locals/registers, output, etc.

Source file opens in the wrong window

By default if you jump to a source file from e.g. the stack trace window it will open on top of the command input window (labeled “2” below) rather than the source file window “1”.

This seems to be “normal” behaviour, and there are loads of threads on Stack Overflow complaining about it but with no conclusive solution. E.g. see here or here.

The problem here is that GUD makes all the popup windows “dedicated” except for the command window. When you jump to a file it opens in the first non-dedicated window, which sort-of makes sense. The function that sets up the windows is called gdb-setup-windows so we can use Emacs’ “advice” system to hook this function and run some extra code afterwards to make the command window dedicated:

(advice-add 'gdb-setup-windows :after
            (lambda () (set-window-dedicated-p (selected-window) t)))

This works because gdb-setup-windows always leaves the command window selected when it finishes.

Quitting messes up the window configuration

How do you quit anyway? I think the correct way is just to run quit in the command window. But no matter how you quit GUD always messes up whatever window configuration you had before you opened it.

We can fix that by saving the window layout when we run M-x gdb by storing the layout into a register in gud-mode-hook. The gud-sentinal function runs when some event occurs on the inferior gdb process. We can hook that to restore the window state when the process exits.

(defconst gud-window-register 123456)
 
(defun gud-quit ()
  (interactive)
  (gud-basic-call "quit"))
 
(add-hook 'gud-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (gud-tooltip-mode)
            (window-configuration-to-register gud-window-register)
            (local-set-key (kbd "C-q") 'gud-quit)))
 
(advice-add 'gud-sentinel :after
            (lambda (proc msg)
              (when (memq (process-status proc) '(signal exit))
                (jump-to-register gud-window-register)
                (bury-buffer))))

I’ve bound C-q to gud-quit which send the quit command to GDB to save typing.

A Final Samsung Q320 Update

April 23rd, 2017

You almost certainly don’t remember but back in 2009 I published a series of articles detailing my travails getting Linux to run smoothly on my then-new Samsung Q320 laptop. Well you’ll be pleased to know that eight years on I’ve finally solved all my remaining issues:

  • The fan randomly spinning up and down
  • The “always-powered” USB port not working
  • General sluggishness

The first two can be fixed by downloading the 06LH BIOS update from July 2010. Maddeningly this can only be installed from Windows. To fix the third problem I swapped the original magnetic disk for a modern SSD (really easy), and at the same time temporarily installed Windows 10 and applied the BIOS update. Then I dd-ed my old disk over the SSD using a USB-SATA adapter.

I’m really happy with the result. Running Debian Stretch everything Just Works and with the SSD it’s pretty speedy. At the moment I’m using it whenever I go home to visit my parents.

GnuCash Quotes for UK Unit Trusts

January 3rd, 2015

In the past I’ve tried and failed to get GnuCash to automatically download stock quotes. At the moment I have to type them in manually which is an excruciating chore. Unfortunately the documentation for how to do this for non-US funds is patchy and the only feedback you get is an unhelpful “computer says no” pop-up.

But today I finally got it to work! Hopefully these steps will save someone else this pain…

  1. Find out the fund’s ISIN code: this is normally on the fact sheet somewhere. It should be a long alphanumeric string starting with “GB” like “GB00BMHTPT71”.
  2. Open the securities editor for that fund. Paste the ISIN code into the box labelled “Symbol/abbreviation” not the one labelled “ISIN, CUSIP or other code”: that’s just there to confuse you.
  3. Select the “Get Online Quotes” checkbox and then the “Unknown” quote source. Then search through the enormous unsorted list in the drop-down for the “ftfunds” option. It should look something like this:
    editor
  4. Open the price editor and click “Get Quotes”
  5. ????
  6. PROFIT!

If that doesn’t work you could try the command line tool gnc-fq-dump. (That’s how I figured this stuff out in the first place.) For example:

$ gnc-fq-dump ftfunds GB0001036531
Finance::Quote fields Gnucash uses:
    symbol: GB0001036531         <=== required
      date: 01/02/2015           <=== required
  currency: GBP                  <=== required
      last: 2.268                <=\       
       nav: 2.268                <=== one of these
     price: 2.268                <=/        
  timezone:                      <=== optional

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Firefox Back to Normal

December 30th, 2014

I’ve been stubbornly ignoring the recent updates to Firefox and using 24 ESR instead as the new Australis changes ruined what was a perfectly nice minimal UI. The biggest problem for me was the inability to move the address bar into the title bar: once you’re accustomed to this having it hanging below is a heinous waste of screen real estate.

Today I decided to give the new ESR version 31 a go and after half an hour or so tweaking with Classic Theme Restorer I managed to make it look like my old Firefox! The “customize” interface now lets me drag the address bar up into the menu bar and get rid of that giant “back” button. For reference, here’s version 24:

firefox24

And here is what I’ve got in version 31:

firefox31

Sticking with Firefox 24

June 20th, 2014

Oh dear. I unwittingly updated to Firefox/Iceweasel 29 in Debian testing. What a mistake! My Firefox setup has remained basically the same since the 3.5 days with a nice unobtrusive layout where I have the menu, navigation buttons, and the address bar in one strip and the tabs below. Despite hours of hair pulling there’s no way to get anything remotely satisfactory with the new UI, even with the “Classic Theme Restorer” addon.

Panic not! It’s possible to just stick with the stable 24.4 version from Debian wheezy! For future reference, this needs to go into /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb [arch=amd64] http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main

Then do this:

sudo apt-get install -t wheezy iceweasel
sudo apt-mark hold iceweasel

UPDATE: I later upgraded to 31 ESR and worked around most of the problems.

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Blurry Chinese Characters on Linux

April 21st, 2014

For future reference, this fixes all woes:

sudo apt-get install xfonts-wqy

UPDATE: a much better solution is to install a pretty TTF font and then make all the characters bigger.

sudo apt-get install fonts-wqy-zenhei fonts-wqy-microhei

Then create a file ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf with the following contents:

<?xml version = "1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <match target="font">
    <test qual="any" name="family" compare="eq">
      <string>WenQuanYi Zen Hei</string>
    </test>
 
    <edit name="pixelsize" mode="assign">
      <times>
        <name>pixelsize</name>
        <double>1.5</double>
      </times>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

Oh yeah: am trying to learn some Chinese characters! Prompted by the arrival of an enormous Chinese phone at work.

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Best Feature

February 5th, 2012

If you needed any convincing that Clementine is the best Linux music player since Amarok 1.4, here it is:

Nyanalyser mode!

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