Summary

This week was planned as the last week for the first (Preparation) and second (Gaining control of the system) parts in my GSoC 2018 proposal. I'm pleased to announce that I've successfully hit the target as planned: a video demonstration posted on Twitter can be watched here.

Reading and …

Preface

After successfully booting Gentoo on Nexus 6P in the previous article, we can move on to launching Android in LXC, which is the last mission in the first period of my GSoC 2018 project. This article documents the process to bring up Android successfully with most of its functions …

Preface

To run LXC, we need a kernel that has the options required by LXC on. This article shows how to build an Android kernel that has the required options on, built by Gentoo's latest stable cross-compile toolchain built by crossdev.

Install Cross-Compile Toolchain

We'll use crossdev, a set of …

Preface

As we now have preinit and the crucial UART console available, we can start bringing up the real GNU/Linux system--Gentoo Linux in this case. This article will focus on the following topics:

• Filesystem structure and mounting procedure (in details)
• Launch sequence to bring up OpenRC
• Crafting a preinit …

The story

As described here, Google baked a serial console into the headphone jack of their Nexus and Pixel devices. A serial console would be feasible for debugging problems with init as well as tinkering the device when it has booted into Linux and haven't started Android yet. My journey …