Who we are

The SoMainline Team is a group of independent developers, who literally fell in love with embedded solutions and small form factor consumer devices like smartphones, tablets, smart-watches on (but definitely not limited to) the ARM and AArch64 architectures, generally running on some sort of Linux-based operating system.

We have started fiddling with consumer smartphones and tablets equipped with various processors and System-on-Chip (or SoC) from various vendors and acknowledged that these small devices were slowly turning to be small form factor fully-fledged computers: this has turned on our wishes to see them fitting more and more of our (always growing) needs through time.
We started contributing to Sony Open Devices, that is a project that brings you an up-to-date kernel and operating system, based on the latest release of the Qualcomm Board Support Package (from now on, called BSP) which also includes a (very often already outdated) customized Linux kernel in an open-source form: from now on, we will refer to this as “downstream”, or “downstream kernel”.

So, what we did there has lead us to learn how many efforts are required to port newer kernels on older pieces of hardware: each release would require a major porting of many of the drivers that are required to make a device, such as a smartphone, to work correctly, due to many obstacles: first of all, Linux is constantly changing, for the better or the worst, with API updates and breakages; Then you have a sort of chipmaker’s API, which would break even more and sometimes would lose support for old SoC basics, that have to be then re-adapted to that.

This made us to think about any ways to stop seeing our work almost completely wasted every year, at every new cycle and, after a bit of head-banging, despite some issues with “this and that” (more on that later), the final solution in our minds was then only one, and the only one that really made sense: UPSTREAM THEM!

What we do

So, we are actively porting the smartphones, laptops and other devices that we own to the mainline Linux kernel, in order to prolong their life, reuse them for other purposes than the ones they were born for, or even just for fun: we think that Open Source is not "just a way" to fully own your device and control what runs on it, but a fundamental part of technology advancement nowadays;

But... not everything goes always alright: during development, it may happen to "hurt" one or two smartphones even though we try hard to not let this happen. We believe that nobody should ever experience this, so we're happy to accept this risk on our own.

However, doing this for our beliefs in the Open Source philosophy (and also for fun) means that we spend our own time, and our own money, to sometimes acquire new devices which are required to let us continue our work.
For this, we constantly need help.

How can you help us

Are you a developer? Do you believe in open source as much as we do?
Get in touch with us! You can lend us a good hand with your coding skills!
We're not just interested in upstreaming devices, but also in improving the User Experience in general: this means that we're not dealing with just C, but also C++, Rust, sometimes even Java and Python.

Do you want to support us?
Buy us a coffee!
... or two ... or... I mean, you don't want us to fall asleep while coding after work, right? 😂

Want to donate your old smart device to us?
Thank you! We will gladly accept it, if it fits our requirements.
Since the requirements for each device will be different, we can't write a big list here; there's only one general rule that apply to all of them: the main board has to reliably work.
As for the rest, would you please contact us? We will have a look together!

Are you creating a commercial Open Source project based on Linux and would like to use our expertise?
We are completely open to that! Please, send us an e-mail!