The Purism team is continuously working on improving the hardware and software support for the Librem 5. These innovations contribute directly to the mainline, upstream kernel so that the hardware can be supported as part of the development community in the future.

Following up on our report for Linux 5.14 and 5.15 this summarizes the progress on mainline support for the Librem 5 phone and its development kit during the 5.16 development cycle. This summary is only about code flowing upstream.

Librem 5 updates

In order to maintain support for the phone, we continuously update the mainline hardware description and default configuration.

Display stack fixes

The panel, LCD interface and DRM bridge drivers saw minor additions that are needed partly due to internal kernel API changes:

The Librem 5 selfie cam

The driver we’ve been writing for the Librem 5 front facing camera sensor is merged along with minor additions to the i.MX media device driver. Stay tuned for the addition to the device tree board files that will conclude this journey and allow one to take a photo on a mainline kernel.

Battery and charge controller

A few cleanups and bugfixes to the drivers for charging the phone were added:

Other additions and fixes

If you’ve ever seen [sda] No Caching mode page found in the kernel error logs you’re not alone. We remove this very common message that describes that a device is being used without a special caching mechanism from the error messages and print it as a warning instead:

Code review

During this round we contributed only 2 Reviewed-by: or Tested-by: tag to patches by other authors. This definitely leaves some room for improvement! Again we would like to thank everybody who reviewed our patches and helped us supporting the hardware in mainline Linux – especially Sakari and again Laurent for reviewing the camera driver and even adding the initial data for it to libcamera.

Sources

Have a look at our Linux tree to see what is currently being worked on and tested (or help if you feel like joining the fun).

Discover the Librem 5

Purism believes building the Librem 5 is just one step on the road to launching a digital rights movement, where we—the-people stand up for our digital rights, where we place the control of your data and your family’s data back where it belongs: in your own hands.

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