Arch Linux running natively on Pixel C

Hi Guys, i'm there again,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQMGkCT9yy0&t=6s

On some free time, i could have run Archlinux natively on Pixel C,
Here are my instructions to play a bit with your device in order to have it working on your device too !

First some warnings :
- You have no warrantly it will work on your device, maybe it can break your device
- This is in a prealpha state, reserved for developpers :
- Wifi is not working, you will have to have an OTG adapter and an USB ethernet card in order to be connected
- GPU is not working (so yes the UI is very slow, consequence of the great resolution of the screen)
- DRM drivers of the google kernel are bugged as hell, for example the cursor won't be visible on the screen if you use an USB mouse.
- No sound

Working things :
- boot
- Touchscreen
- Display
- Gnome Desktop (but quite slow due to no harware acceleration)

How to make this work (Developpers only):
- Format your Data partition on your Pixel C in order to disable the default encryption of Data partition.

USE WITH CAUTION !

- Install a stock kernel on your pixel C that disable forced data encryption, otherwise as soon as you will reboot to android, you will have to format your data partition again ! (you can flash superSu that will modify your stock kernel and will do that for you)
- Download the rootfs here : https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzWwMqZZvtXSTDhZWTA0RUhrTjg
- Untar the rootfs in your data partition in /data (so that the directories bin,etc... are in /data/Arch). You can use TWRP and a comandline for this (tar -xzpvf Arch.tar.gz )
- Download the kernel here : https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzWwMqZZvtXScUsyYXBwaXpoRm8

Now enter fastboot mode and run :


if you want to flash it on your boot partition :

DO THIS WITH CAUTION !

Your Arch sytem will boot

user : alarm
password :alarm

Note that a sshd deamon is running and accessible on the network !

Good luck !

If you're happy of this work and you want to have more detailed instructions please pay me a beer ! Because developing for Pixel C is time consuming
http://paypal.me/MathieuTournier

Reserved

Download links are now available

H0lmEd said:

Did you compile the kernel yourself? How did you figure out what modules to include? Do you have a (menu)config file you could share?

This is incredible, wondering how hard it is to repeat on other tablets/devices

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

Yes I will share more details soon !
The current state is not usable yet, but I know it's possible to run a mainline kernel on this device (thanks to Nvidia guys ). There is still a lot of work to do and I am very busy too with other projects I hope my work will give ideas to some Linux kernel developpers so that they can help us to have mainline kernel running on Pixel C more quickly.

Not sure the hybris approach can work here as Pixel C is using nouveau and tegra DRM + Nvidia blob for GPU acceleration.

I will share some code soon so that people can contribute.
Pixel C has great hardware, and we are approaching to run something on it that will be able to benefit of all its capabilities.

Beware that I cannot garranty any improvements as I'm doing this on my free time,

Stay stunned !

Samt434

Guys i have some good news about this project,

I could finally boot and run Arch on a mainline kernel (4.9) on the pixel C. (Yeah !)
Unfortunatly, DRM is not initialising correctly yet... so no display yet with the 4.9 kernel...

[ 3.622872] [drm] Supports vblank timestamp caching Rev 2 (21.10.2013).
[ 3.629493] [drm] No driver support for vblank timestamp query.
[ 3.635453] drm drm: failed to allocate buffer of size 18432000
[ 3.641375] drm drm: failed to set initial configuration: -12

It seems there is still some work to do to initialise the display correctly,
but I think we will have soon Arch with GPU accelerated UI soon

Samt434