[Nokia 8 ROMs, Kernels, Recoveries, & Other Develop] THMSP:
"NOST" - short for "No Service Tool" (or "Nokia Service Tool" but that sounds too official and boring :P) is a small hobby project I've been working on in the last couple of days.

It aims to make the service tool for Nokia 8 (and HMD Phones in general) more useable, user-friendly, and straigtforward to use, and after having to test it myself, and also

making a small beta test in the Telegram group for Nokia 8, I feel like posting it here so others can try it out too if they want.

First, to be clear: NOST is not completely my work. It is based on OST LA 6.0.4, which was made by HMD/Foxconn. Unlike the previous OST Patches, NOST does not replace

the executable with a hacked one, but instead wraps it and patches the methods that need patching at runtime. The result is that the changes are completely opensource

and readable by others, while the underlying OST files are not modified at all. I tried to base it on a different (i.e. newer) version of OST, but those are pretty much unpatchable,

at least not with a serious amount of reverse engineering, which brings not only time issues but legal ones as well.

NOST changes a couple of things, compared to the unmodified OST LA:

It removes the need for authentification against HMD/FIH servers (really, shoutout to the one who made the original hack, even though I could not use their code)

Moved the logs folder to the same folder as the application, as opposed to somewhere on the system to make debugging easier

The options for flashing firmware images appear reliable now. (At least for me they only appeared sometimes if not never on the original OST).

Removed one of the options that if it appeared crashed the flashing process ("Check System AP Status")

One user of the Telegram group had issues where OST would crash because it detects an invalid locale setting in Windows. NOST just catches that issue and defaults to english

Removed the "Edit Phone Information" button. It never worked and it's only purpose was to make the "Next" button appear, which works like it should now as well.

NOST refuses to flash your phone if your bootloader isn't unlocked critically. The old OST would just try to flash but never make any progress which confuses inexperienced users.

Perhaps the most important change: NOST allows to flash modified firmware images without the need to extract and modify them by hand.

With the original OST, people who wanted to reflash their phone had to download a firmware bundle, extract and edit it to be able to use it with OST LA 6.0.4, since the newer versions

had unpatchable issues that prevent using them. Repacking the images in a format OST expects wasn't possible either since that enabled some sort of signature algorithm on the modified

images and caused the flashing to fail. NOST solves this problem by allowing the use of a different packaging format. Those binaries still need to be extracted but it is done transparently in

the background without the user having to download any other tools. The formats that can be used in images are .zip and .qlz

.zip Firmwares:

.zip firmware files are simply archives of the (edited) files that would normally be extracted from an .nb0 file. This means, if you extract a .nb0 with the extractor found on XDA, the contents

of the *_unpacked folder it creates should be the contents of your .zip.

.qlz Firmwares:

.qlz files are based on QuickLZ compression, which gives them a small size but also a low decompression time.

The tool to generate them is called exdupe. Generating these images is pretty straigtforward. Assuming you are on windows, download the exdupe

tool from the link above (or take it from the NOST Tools/ folder) and copy it into the folder that contains the unpacked .nb0.

- exdupe.exe
- <nb0 name>_unpacked/
- <nb0 name>.mlf
- ....

Open a commandline in that folder, and run the following command:

exdupe.exe <name of the folder to compress> <name of the firmware file>.qlz

You should already see how fast it compresses the firmware folder now. As a reference: Compressing the latest Nokia 8 firmware (about 4GB) takes maybe 30 seconds and yields a 2GB file.

Repacked Firmware Bundles:

I created .qlz images of the May and November firmwares, as well as one of the various Pie Maintainance Releases.

You can find them here: https://tmsp.io/fs/xda/nb1/firmware

I already successfully reverted from December Security Patch to November using NOST, and then updated back using OTA Sideloading without problems.

As always when working with flashing tools, proceed with caution!

How to unlock to critical:

Download:

The actual tool: https://github.com/StollD/NOST/releases

Drivers: https://github.com/StollD/nokia-driver-installer/tree/master/out

Source Code: https://github.com/StollD/NOST

License:

OST LA 6.0.4 is copyrighted by the respective authors. It is not modified permanently.

The custom NOST code is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Icon by Freepik © Flaticon