The release of the postmarketOS 21.06 project is presented, which develops a Linux distribution for smartphones based on Alpine Linux, Musl and BusyBox. The goal of the project is to provide the possibility of using a Linux distribution on a smartphone that does not depend on the official firmware support life cycle and is not tied to standard solutions of the main industry players that set the development vector. Builds are prepared for PINE64 PinePhone, Purism Librem 5 and 15 community supported devices including Samsung Galaxy A3/A3/S4, Xiaomi Mi Note 2/Redmi 2, OnePlus 6 and even Nokia N900. Limited experimental support provided for 330 devices.
The postmarketOS environment is unified as much as possible and puts all device-specific components into a separate package, all other packages are identical for all devices and are based on Alpine Linux packages. Whenever possible, the assemblies use the vanilla Linux kernel, and if this is not possible, then the kernels from the firmware prepared by the device manufacturers. KDE Plasma Mobile, Phosh, Sxmo are offered as the main user shells, but it is possible to install other environments, including GNOME, MATE and Xfce.
In the new release:
- The package base is synchronized with Alpine Linux 3.14.
- The number of devices officially supported by the community has been increased from 11 to 15. Support has been added for OnePlus 6, OnePlus 6T, Xiaomi Mi Note 2 and Xiaomi Redmi 2 smartphones. Phosh, Plasma Mobile and Sxmo skin packages are provided for each of the supported devices, except Nokia N900 .
- Updated versions of all user interfaces.
- When unlocking an encrypted rootfs partition with the osk-sdl utility, the write and read operations queues are now disabled, which allowed for a file system with a 4K block size to increase write performance by about 35%, and read by 33%.
- The installer removed the request for a separate name and password for the SSH user.
- The PinePhone kernel has been optimized to extend battery life. The Linux kernel for Pine64 devices is built based on the developments of the linux-sunxi project.
- It is forbidden to enter standby mode during music playback, even if the application does not directly block the activation of the screen saver through the inhibit API.
- Moved changes aimed at improving the stability of Wi-Fi on the Librem 5 smartphone. Librem 5 has added support for the use of smart cards.
- The Phosh UI user environment has been migrated by default to the Portfolio file manager, which is better adapted to mobile device screens. The previously shipped Nemo can be installed from the Alpine Linux repository.
- For all devices except OnePlus 6/6T and Xiaomi Mi Note 2, a predefined set of nftables packet filter rules is enabled by default. The default rules allow incoming SSH connections over Wi-Fi and USB network adapters, as well as DHCP requests over USB adapters. On the WWAN network interface (access via 2G/3G/4G/5G), any incoming connections are denied. Outgoing connections are allowed for all types of network interfaces.
Source: opennet.ru