Google Releases Early Patches for Running Mainline Linux on Its Pixel 10 Smartphone Family
"Barebones device trees" plus an as-yet unreleased bootloader get a non-Android Linux kernel booting as far as a text-based console.
A software engineer at Google has released the first patches in a series which could, one day, allow mainline Linux to boot on the company's Pixel 10 smartphone family — opening them up to running non-Android operating systems.
"This series adds barebones device trees for Pixel 10 (frankel), Pixel 10 Pro (blazer), and Pixel 10 Pro XL (mustang)," Google's Douglas Anderson explained in an email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) this week. "With a yet-unreleased bootloader these can boot to a UART command prompt from an initramfs."
Launched earlier this year, Google's Pixel 10 family of smartphones is the latest in its in-house design line and, naturally, runs Google's own Android operating system. While this is built atop the Linux kernel, it's heavily customized — and there's no easy way to swap Android out for other Linux-based operating systems.
That could change, though, with Anderson's patch series indicating interest at Google in opening things up a little more. The device tree patches are the first step towards allowing mainline Linux, the same kernel used on non-Android devices, to run atop a Pixel 10 — though at the moment it requires a custom bootloader that has yet to be publicly released, and only presents the user with a basic text-based console.
The route from these patches to the ability to actually use the smartphone's features under a non-Android Linux-based operating system, then, could be a long one — and there's no word yet on how far Google plans to take its contributions, or if considers the job done once a console session is up and running.
More details, and discussion on the patches, can be found on the Linux Kernel Mailing List archive.