[Android General] limited_imagination:
So all this recent activity in this thread has incited me to go back to the drawing board, and try to put together a buildable kernel from source code for the Tab3-850F.

Thanks much to all the usual suspects here. Sort of! Time well wasted, maybe. :)

I hadn't looked at this stuff in > a year, but decided to give it another bash. None of the previous source codes for building the Tab3-850F kernel that I have seen posted to date, would actually build a kernel if you tried to compile them.

But I think I have something worth posting here now.

I have mashed together a source code for this thing that will actually build. Good god, I can hardly believe my eyes, but it gets right to the end of the compile process, and generates an "Image.gz" and an "Image.gz-dtb" file in the /arch/arm64/boot/ folder.

I have created a tar.gz archive of this buildable source code and uploaded it to Google drive, so the keen kids here can have a look, play with it, and either tell me it's a great step forward, or that it's rubbish.

It is a large file at 526.6 MB, available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KeA5K894q1e0w-ngKBC-Avm7MbNwpY93/view?usp=sharing

I think this should work on Google drive, but if there is a problem, and you want a copy, then PM me and I will try to figure out a different storage method.

I'm certain that this is

NOT

yet worth using to flash on the device itself as it stands now, because the configs don't line up exactly with a number of the chips used in my stock US market Tab3-850F, according to the info produced by the "Device Info HW" app, available on Google Play.

But at least it compiles, and that's exciting enough to me to justify posting here. I hope much of the tidying at this point may be a "relatively simple" matter of fiddling with the "make menuconfig" command in Linux, before future compile efforts. I left a basic .config file here in the source tree that people can modify with "make menuconfig", if they want to advance this side project.

There are plenty of threads on XDA here that explain how to compile a kernel, so I won't bother referring to them. The people who I expect to be interested in this butchery, already know how to do that. But for the record, I set up a 64-bit Ubuntu operating system in VMware Workstation Player 12.5.9, on my Windows 10 PC, in order to compile this thing. I then installed the android-ndk-r17 toolchain into the Linux VM, and after that, the following commands should work to compile the kernel in a Linux terminal:

[first, when you open the terminal, "CD" into the folder where you decide to unzip the source code]

export ARCH=arm64
export CROSS_COMPILE=/home/… - PATH TO YOUR TOOLCHAIN FOLDER … /android-ndk-r17/toolchains/aarch64-linux-android-4.9/prebuilt/linux-x86_64/bin/aarch64-linux-android-
make -i CONFIG_NO_ERROR_ON_MISMATCH=y CROSS_COMPILE=/home/… -PATH TO YOUR TOOLCHAIN FOLDER … /android-ndk-r17/toolchains/aarch64-linux-android-4.9/prebuilt/linux-x86_64/bin/aarch64-linux-android- >& error-msg

The error-msg text file I have set up in these commands generates a log of the compile process. There are plenty of warnings that I deprecated, in order to permit the build to complete, so consider yourself "warned". The original source code from Lenovo, as incomplete and useless as it was, configured all warnings to be treated as errors, and I have stripped out this safety net. Be aware! The 59 section mismatch errors are especially eye watering, but since it still compiles, I call this mess a "win" for the moment.

I zipped up a log file generated this way during my own compile, and attach it here, viewable as a text file in Notepad++ on a Windows PC, or in Mousepad or suchlike on a Linux PC or virtual machine. Windows Notepad makes it illegible.