17 PRs were merged during the month. (The link says 18, but one of them was, to me, late in February, read the previous news item).

Let’s look at some of these.

Pine64 Pinephone “Braveheart”

This was teased about on the author’s twitter account. The inexpensive Pinephone is the latest new device added to Mobile NixOS.

This brings a bit more than only a new device. This is the fourth system type added to Mobile NixOS. The added system type (U-Boot) in theory will give us the ability to support any U-Boot-based system in a common way. In practice the still unmerged and WIP #94 shows how this is true by using U-Boot with another Pine64 device, the Pinebook Pro.

A nice thing that was verified again with this new device port is that the stage-2 image (the rootfs, the system.img) is indeed universal. It is using the same AArch64 build of the system image as Android-based devices, and Depthcharge-based devices.

Our build for the Pinephone relies on the downstream kernel from the Pine64 community, with only one added patch. The same is done for the U-Boot build.

The added patches are user-experience-focused patches that are using the RGB LED of the phone to show the boot status.

Other than that, the hardware support is not complete, but it is supported at the same level as other devices, plus Wi-Fi working.