[Successful] installation of PureOS on PinePhone

#1

Detailed description is here but what I figured is:

  • Librem5 u-boot is heavily customized comparing to mainline one
  • Librem5 kernel in its L5 build (expectedly) cannot boot on A64 despite both being A53 ARMv8 little-endian architecture.

Comparing to any x86 kernel being still able to boot (at least somehow) on any x86 hardware. The biggest problem with locked x86 is usually bootloader, but once you can load the kernel you can at least initialize basic services. But yes I know a bit arm achitecture and didn’t have high hopes :slight_smile:

So next step would be to build kernel for a64 and replace kernel and ramdisk in pre-built L5 image…
P.S. I know about debos-pinephone project and was inspired by it but I really want to run genuine pureos image :slight_smile: stay tuned.

#2

Today, I managed to install PureOS on a PinePhone following these instructions. It looks great.

#3

yea, that’s basically the next step (take the kernel and ramdisk from working pinephone image) but this is excatly what I’ve tried to avoid in my first step - making dependency on two projects. Preferred approach would be to generate new kernel+ramfs (even if using their kernel .config)

Edit: Interesting, in referred instructions the existing (pureos) initramfs was reused with pmos kernel. I’ve also tried that (the kernel which is shipped with the phone is pmos 5.4 kernel) but that didn’t fly. Perhaps need to add kernel modules, maybe it actually managed to reach the fsmount phase just didn’t manage to init serial console and spit back anything without modules. The other difference though is the kernel in link above is 5.5 (not 5.4 as the one pre-installed) and pureos is using 5.6.

#4

I’ve tried PureOS on my pinephone and it’s impressive. Purism is doing great! I can’t wait to have my Librem5 on my hands. Meanwhile it’d be nice to have PureOS on my Pinephone.

#5

So yea, it works. I just should have used what I originally planned - ci build artefacts from pine64-org/linux repo. Somehow I thought that was what would be sent in a stock image but apparently it wasn’t.
Oh yea and forgot to mention

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#6

Does anyone know how the CPU in the Pinephone compares to the Librem 5? I mean I assumed the L5’s cpu is more powerful, but the L5 has more RAM as well right?

The Pinephone has a nice design, and it is good to see PureOS firing up on it as well.

#7

I don’t know whether this is up to date but: Comparing specs of upcoming Linux phones

#8

Right, that says that they are different chips, but I’m interested in relative performance.

My moto g7 power feels just as fast as the pixel 2 I had, but they are different chipsets, etc.

#9

I haven’t seen any benchmarks of the two phones, but look at the specs:
Librem 5: i.MX 8M Quad (4x Cortex-A53, 1.5 GHz, 28nm), LPDDR4-3200
PinePhone: Allwinner A64 (4x Cortex-A53, 1.2 GHz, 40nm), LPDDR3

The CPU clock is 25% faster in the i.MX 8M and with the faster RAM, I would expect 1/3 better CPU performance on the Librem 5 than on the PinePhone, once Purism solves the heat dissipation problem in Dogwood. However, the GPU performance is significantly better in the Librem 5. Sebastian Krzyszkowiak (seb_dos1) posted on reddit a couple weeks ago the glxgears score on the Librem 5, and it was roughly 2.5 times better than on the PinePhone.