OnePlus X (oneplus-onyx) kernel won't boot with postmarketOS compiler
I'm well into porting postmarketOS to the OnePlus X, but have run into a blocking issue: kernels built with the postmarketOS toolchain won't boot.
I thought I'd create this issue to solicit some ideas from the community, and record my work in case this issue comes up with another device.
I diagnosed this as follows:
My initial symptom was that after flashing or
fastboot boot
, the device would reboot after a few seconds, never leaving the manufacturer splash screen, and return back to fastboot mode.I found that the LineageOS kernel did not exhibit this behaviour, even with the postmarketOS initramfs.
I narrowed it down:
My first thought was device tree files. Both the LineageOS & postmarketOS build processes produce the same list of 10 dtb files, all are bit-for-bit identical.I concatenated them on to the end of the lineageOS zImage file (the one made without the dtbs already added), and it boots!
I then concatenated them (same order) on to the end of the postmarketOS zImage, and that one doesn't boot, just waits a couple of seconds then reboots.
Next, kernel configuration. I copied the configuration being used for postmarketOS to the lineage source tree and compiled it myself. The resulting kernel also booted (in fact, I was able to get weston & touchscreen working well).
Both of these kernels are being built on the exact same git commit.
At this point, the only differences between the two kernels are the compilers used to build them.To confirm this, I built the LineageOS kernel out of the full lineage build environment, with the
arm-linux-androideabi
toolchain. This kernel boots.I have seen a kernel which claims to be built using gcc 6 and work on the OnePlus X (blu_spark), and confirmed that it boots fine. But, when building from source, using the postmarketOS toolchain, I again run into the rebooting issue
At this point, I highly suspect the issue is something to do with the postmarketOS build tools.
In an attempt to resolve this, I tried to package the prebuilt arm-linux-androideabi
toolchain for postmarketos, but unfortunately it was built with glibc
, and it can't run in the alpine environment.
My next step is to try and convince the source for that toolchain to compile under the chroot, though I don't expect to have much success.