Compiling stock Android 2.3 from scratch

[Guest jventura]

Hi all,

i'm trying to learn about kernels, androids and stuff like that, and i'm very interested in starting my own Android 2.3 ROM from (almost) scratch, or stock Android 2.3 if you wish to see it that way. I've tried compiling Cyanogenmod7 before and was successful, so you can assume that i have all the tools installed (adb, repo, java6 etc.). But i want to compile Android 2.3 from Android.com git and not Cyanogenmod's git, and also i would prefer no to use the blade kernel source code hacked by cyanogenmod team.

I'm not fully aware of the difficulty around it, although i've tried somethings already. So, this is what i have done (basically following this guide):

- My laptop has the tools already configured to compile Android and the kernel

- I have downloaded the stock Android source code

- I have also downloaded the 2.3.32 kernel for blade from "https://github.org/ZTE-BLADE/ZTE-BLADE-2.6.32.git" which i believe it's the more close to "scratch" that we can get regarding the more recent "official" blade kernel

But now i'm somewhat stuck here!

1) First, i believe this kernel is Gen1 (although i'm not sure) and my blade is gen2 (TPT)

2) Also, stock Android source code, under device, hasn't ZTE/Blade, so i can't "lunch or brunch blade"

3) I don't understand exactly what to do with the kernel compilation output files

So, i'm posting this to see if anyone has already got around this and can post some advice as for instance:

1) Should be better to revert to gen1 (via TPT) to start "playing" around this?

2) How to create Blade under /device and where to get the source code for the folders (like libaudio, libcamera, firmware, etc.) without copying it from cyanogenmod project? Is there a place with this source code from scratch? I believe so because if cyanogenmod project uses it, they must have got them from somewhere (or else they've builded it)

3) Anyone has links for what to do from here to get a workable/bootable ROM?

Thanks in advance,

João Ventura

Edited May 15, 2011 by jventura

[Guest Grain]

1) The differences between GEN1 and GEN2 are minimal. Look at Cyanogen kernel changes when they moved from GEN1 to GEN2. It's basically only changing some offsets and replacing the (binary only) RIL files.

2) Device support libs were basically copied and modified from several sources. Sources for the original ZTE libs are not available as far as I know.

I don't quite know what you want to achieve.

If you want to learn about kernels, try to help building a more up-to-date Blade kernel (t0mm13b already started that).

If you want to learn more about Android, try helping the Cyanogen team to fix bugs. Fiddling with the ZTE kernel sources (note that the Cyanogen Blade kernel is basically just that with some minor updates and fixes) or AOSP will not achieve much.

[Guest jventura]

1) The differences between GEN1 and GEN2 are minimal. Look at Cyanogen kernel changes when they moved from GEN1 to GEN2. It's basically only changing some offsets and replacing the (binary only) RIL files.

2) Device support libs were basically copied and modified from several sources. Sources for the original ZTE libs are not available as far as I know.

I don't quite know what you want to achieve.

If you want to learn about kernels, try to help building a more up-to-date Blade kernel (t0mm13b already started that).

If you want to learn more about Android, try helping the Cyanogen team to fix bugs. Fiddling with the ZTE kernel sources (note that the Cyanogen Blade kernel is basically just that with some minor updates and fixes) or AOSP will not achieve much.

Hi Grain,

1) Yeah, i've seen the kernel changes when CM7 passed to Gen2 (Nightly 39 to Nightly 40), and at that time i've tried to compile CM7 with those offsets back go Gen1 (something like 0x2a00.. something, you can read a post i did on Cyanogenmod forum here [the first on that page] ), but CM7 wouldn't boot, so i thought it was not that simple. Maybe i have to explore it again..

2) It would be good to know from where they initially came, but maybe someone started them reverse-engineering..

Basically i would like to create an alternative to CM7, more close to stock Android, and hopefully (however, not directly associated with stock Android) more robust and reliable for use. Following that path, it will come many headaches but also some learning about some low-level things such as Kernel and other things. For a little bit of context, i'm doing a PhD course in extraction of semantic information from texts using statistical methods, and as such, i use a lot of high level tools, so i'm in the "need" of learning some low-level things! :unsure:

Thanks,

João Ventura

[Guest Grain]

1) Yeah, i've seen the kernel changes when CM7 passed to Gen2 (Nightly 39 to Nightly 40), and at that time i've tried to compile CM7 with those offsets back go Gen1 (something like 0x2a00.. something, you can read a post i did on Cyanogenmod forum here [the first on that page] ), but CM7 wouldn't boot, so i thought it was not that simple. Maybe i have to explore it again..

You have to use the old offsets when compiling the kernel and when assembling boot.img. For CM, these settings are in kernel .config and BoardConfig.mk. If you adjust that (and the RIL libs) properly, you'll get a GEN1 build.

Basically i would like to create an alternative to CM7, more close to stock Android, and hopefully (however, not directly associated with stock Android) more robust and reliable for use.

I'd rather create a stable fork of Cyanogen for the Blade then. If you replace ADW with the standard Gingerbread launcher, I doubt many people would notice the difference between stock Android and CM.