[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] linuxsociety:
Hey guys I just picked up this device a few days ago, and I'm an experience kernel developer for anroid, although I haven't worked on a project in quite some time and I really didn't intend to pick up a project phone, but seeing where the development took off with heads high in the air, and kinda left everyone high and dry with all this DISCONTINUED status of dev work, it makes me just want to try something. I by no means have a PC right now that is anywhere near fast enough or has enough ram to do in depth android development, so I really don't 'want' to get into this. But looking at the issues with 7.x rom's and the R1 HD, it appears to me a simple problem that could be fixed once the original kernel sources were obtained.

I see a lot of fiasco about the 64bit / 32 bit support which isn't of importance to me since this device isn't trying to allocate more than 4GB of usable memory anyway. As far as performance with less than 2GB ram on this device the matter about the kernel / rom being 32/64 doesn't really mean much.

From what I do see it looks as though everything that is bootable using a non-stock rom still uses the stock kernel / boot.img right?

Does any developers here have any logcat output of a non-stock kernel they've tried to boot using a nougat 7.x rom?

Has anyone tried pulling the Kernel config for the device from /proc/config.gz? Or is the proc config not compiled in support for this kernel (OEM's for some reason don't like to include this option) which makes life on a dev that doesn't have original kernel sources available a little bit easier as we can look and see what we need =Y and =M to relatively quickly and then see what non-mainline kernel patches we need to include to get a non-stock working kernel built for 7.x

My thoughts of the matter are a cross-compiler toolchain incompatiblity in the userland of android 7.x vs the stock kernel, OR VERMAGIC of a proprietary kernel module not matching properly.

It seems the only things that appears to be a struggle with the development of this device have all been kernel related. I really wish a dev that had a proper arm toolchain could work with me a bit in some spare time to get things like the Camera working properly. Recompiling all of Android N isn't really necessary as this is most likely a kernel specific bug or ABI mismatch with the newer Nougat libs. Our 3.x kernel is quite obsolete when compared to the newer things implemented into Android 7, and most usually one would expect to have a lot more breakage than just the camera. So if we could get this camera working and any other hardware that might not be working, then it would be a big success. The kernel version has no meaning, and being 32bit/64bit has no meaning really either.

Some direct links to github sources or any other sources of what you guys have woking right now would be really helpful. Logcat output of whats working. Logcat output of custom kernels that fail to boot. Any direct links to a device tree overlay for our board would be real nice too. With all these pages of information on the device its hard for me to make heads or tails of where the actual development stands and what the major holdback is.

To be clear though the working Lineage rom that has everything working EXCEPT camera, is using the stock kernel boot.img but basically just a 32bit ported /system /lib /etc in a flashable .zip? I could decipher the .zip's update-script / binary to see what is really going on but I'd a lot rather speak to an experienced dev about all this, in hopes of a collaborative effort to patch the camera issue and any other issues that may not be so noticeable to the standard users. I seen some mention of the hotspot feature being broken in some of the threads I've looked through. Whats the status on the hotpsot? Thats one thing I do have to have working for it to be a daily driver and is of much more importance to me than the camera actually.

Sorry for a long post guys, I really hope to hear from someone who has done a bit more than pieced together some /system files from another device.

P.S. ignore my signature in this post pertaining to devices, I don't post on XDA very often unless I'm working on a project I've not updated my signature in a couple years ;)