HTC Wildfire status report

Created by: feinerer

I made some initial efforts to port HTC Wildfire (aka as Buzz) and would like to document it (not ready for a PR as booting is not working): https://github.com/feinerer/pmbootstrap/commit/a966d8472daeded6b583a1990903b5841d20ecda

Kernel configuration

Kernel is from the 2.6.35 series. Changes in the kernel configuration compared to the original buzz_defconfig are:

• CONFIG_SYSVIPC enabled
• CONFIG_ANDROID_PARANOID_NETWORK disabled
• CONFIG_DEVTMPFS enabled (with CONFIG_DEVTMPFS_MOUNT disabled)
• CONFIG_VGA_CONSOLE disabled (to avoid PCIMEM_BASE undefined)

There is also the LineageOS Device repository for HTC Buzz but I could not extract relevant information out of it.

Patches

• timeconst_fix.patch as known from other devices
• msleep_MKDEV_fix.patch is only needed if CONFIG_USB_ETH is set

In APKBUILD's prepare() function I added grep -lr 'uninitialized_var' . | xargs sed -i 's/uninitialized_var//g' for removing uninitialized_var() which is no longer supported. The grep could of course be precomputed (as the file list never changes giving a static kernel source) to make it faster but for the moment was easier and shorter this way.

Boot image offsets

pmbootstrap bootimg_analyze yields both from a CyanogenMod and an official HTC boot image the same offsets:

deviceinfo_kernel_cmdline="no_console_suspend=1 console=null"
deviceinfo_generate_bootimg="true"
deviceinfo_bootimg_qcdt="false"
deviceinfo_flash_offset_base="0x02e00000"
deviceinfo_flash_offset_kernel="0x00008000"
deviceinfo_flash_offset_ramdisk="0x01000000"
deviceinfo_flash_offset_second="0x00f00000"
deviceinfo_flash_offset_tags="0x00000100"
deviceinfo_flash_pagesize="2048"

Status

pmbootstrap build linux-htc-buzz and pmbootstrap install --no-fde --sdcard=/dev/sdb work but pmbootstrap flasher boot shows after upload only a HTC Logo. fastboot devices still sees the phone at this stage and nothing changes (consequently no IP address assigned etc.). This is the same as reported in the first sentence of https://github.com/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/issues/99#issuecomment-309950352.

I tried to use CONFIG_USB_ETH without success. It seems the initramfs/kernel cannot boot already at a very early stage (identical behaviour as before).

Flashing the kernel and system image do not work at the moment (remote: image update error). I guess that the files are just too big. But that should not matter for sdcard installation in combination with pmbootstrap flasher boot at the moment.

Bootlocker

Latest hboot (HTC bootloader) and unlock applied from https://www.htcdev.com/bootloader. The device is also S-OFF so signed binaries are not enforced if I am correct.

Modify boot image

I also tried to modify an existing working CyanogenMod boot image as described here: https://github.com/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/issues/99#issuecomment-327596258

abootimg -u boot.img -k zImage -r initrd.img -c "bootsize=3092480"

Increasing the bootsize was necessary as the pmOS initramfs is huge compared to the original one (i.e., more than 1 MB difference). Using this new boot image shows the the same symptoms as described above.

Any ideas or pointer are highly appreciated. Thank you!