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Building CyanogenMod for Google Nexus 4

Authors

Android Derivative ROMs

  • AOSP

  • CyanogenMod

  • Kandroid

  • MIUI

  • Aliyun OS

  • AOKP

  • Baidu Yi

  • LeWa OS

  • OPhone

  • Replicant

  • XobotOS

  • Stock

    • HTC Sense

    • Samsung TouchWiz

    • LG Optimus UI

    • Sony UI

For more, check Wikipedia.

An excellent video tutorial on Youtube

Components

Hardware driver (proprietary)

Using ./extract-files to extract vendor drivers from real device.

/media/android/cm/system/device/lge/mako$ ll extract-files.sh
-rwxrwxr-x 1 lucas lucas 354 Nov 18 23:19 extract-files.sh*

This pulls data from device's /system directory to /vendor/lge/mako/proprietary directory.

lucas@lucas-ubuntu:/media/android/cm/system/vendor/lge/mako/proprietary$ ll
total 24
drwxr-xr-x 6 lucas lucas 4096 Nov 19 11:29 ./
drwxr-xr-x 3 lucas lucas 4096 Nov 19 10:17 ../
drwxr-xr-x 2 lucas lucas 4096 Nov 19 11:29 bin/
drwxr-xr-x 3 lucas lucas 4096 Nov 19 11:29 etc/
drwxr-xr-x 5 lucas lucas 4096 Nov 19 11:29 lib/
drwxr-xr-x 4 lucas lucas 4096 Nov 19 11:29 vendor/

These include drivers for CPU, NFC from Broadcom, Camera, Sensors, Audio, DRM, Cryptography from LG, and imgs, GSM, Camera, GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Sensors, Media, DRM, DSP, USB from Qualcomm. All these drivers are proprietary.

Kernel

The next thing is to build the kernel source. Use breakfast mako (code name for Nexus 4) to download kernel source code from GitHub.

Android

Building

Environment setup

  • Ubuntu 64 bit

  • Android SDK

  • JDK

  • Python

Download source

  • repo

  • mkdir, /media/android/cm/system/

CM source file structure

link: http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Doc:_the_cm_source

  • bionic

  • build

  • bootable: cwm recovery

  • dalvik

  • art, replacement of dalvik, android runtime

  • device, board support packages and configurations for a particular device. device/<vendor>/<codename>, /device/asus/grouper, device/lge/mako, where to put customized stuff for each device. breakfast grouper && repo sync

  • docs: android open source website

  • external, non-android utilities, with Android.mk to work with android build system

  • frameworks, Android core

  • hardware, platform/hardware specific libs

  • kernel, /kernel/<vendor>/<codename>

  • ndk

  • out, make clobber

  • packages, Android standalone apps, like Settings, Browser, Launcher, etc

  • prebuilt(s)

  • system: linux shell, etc.

  • vendor: cm, lge, htc, etc

For Nexus 4:

  • vendor: cm

  • hardware: ti

  • kernel: google/msm

  • device: lge/mako

Repo manifest format

top level ./.repo/default.xml XML file.

  • manifest: the root element of the file.

  • remote: git url shared by one or more projects and the gerrit review server those projects upload changes through.

  • name: short git remote name

  • alias: override name if specified in each project's .git/config

  • fetch: git url prefix for all projects which use this remote

  • review: gerrit review server used by repo update

  • default: used when a project does not specify remote and revision.

  • manifest-server

  • project: single git repo.

  • annotation

  • remove-project

  • include

Local Manifests

.repo/local_manifests/*.xml

/device/lge/mako/extract-files.sh
adb pull /system/* to /vendor/lge/mako/proprietary

The problems encountered during downloading the cm source

Since the source repo is huge, the downloading process can be intermittent.

  1. build
breakfast
brunch
lunch

build files

.mk Makefiles /build

Each module/subproject has an Android.mk file, telling the build system how to build the module, and where to put the output in the Android directory.

The built files are put in /out/target/project/CODENAME, with zipped flashable recovery*.zip and fastboot*.img files.

$OUT directory

$OUT= /out/target/project/CODENAME

  • kernel
  • /system, the /system folder on Android
  • /root, contains the files that will be turned into ramdisk loaded and run by the kernel, including init, init.rc, init.CODENAME.rc
  • /recovery/root, ramdisk contains the recovery mode
mm: make modules, mm -B
adb sync system

adb remount= adb shell mount -o rw,remount /system

Build Success

/media/android/cm/system/out/target/product/mako
➜  mako  ls -la
total 803408
drwxrwxr-x 10 lucas lucas      4096 Nov 19 21:15 .
drwxrwxr-x  3 lucas lucas      4096 Nov 19 18:33 ..
-rw-rw-r--  1 lucas lucas        19 Nov 19 18:34 android-info.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 lucas lucas   6436864 Nov 19 21:02 boot.img
-rw-rw-r--  1 lucas lucas     34552 Nov 19 18:33 clean_steps.mk
-rw-rw-r--  2 lucas lucas 189761342 Nov 19 21:15 cm-10.2-20131119-UNOFFICIAL-mako.zip
-rw-rw-r--  1 lucas lucas       120 Nov 19 21:15 cm-10.2-20131119-UNOFFICIAL-mako.zip.md5sum
-rw-rw-r--  2 lucas lucas 189761342 Nov 19 21:15 cm_mako-ota-3f402468d6.zip
drwxrwxr-x  2 lucas lucas      4096 Nov 19 20:46 data
drwxrwxr-x  4 lucas lucas      4096 Nov 19 18:39 external
drwxrwxr-x  2 lucas lucas      4096 Nov 19 21:10 fake_packages
-rw-rw-r--  1 lucas lucas     71456 Nov 19 21:13 installed-files.txt
-rwxrwxr-x  1 lucas lucas   5997088 Nov 19 20:36 kernel
drwxrwxr-x 18 lucas lucas      4096 Nov 19 21:13 obj
-rw-rw-r--  1 lucas lucas        49 Nov 19 21:14 ota_script_path
-rw-rw-r--  1 lucas lucas       669 Nov 19 18:33 previous_build_config.mk
-rw-rw-r--  1 lucas lucas    434701 Nov 19 21:01 ramdisk.img
-rw-rw-r--  1 lucas lucas   3845120 Nov 19 21:03 ramdisk-recovery.cpio
-rw-rw-r--  1 lucas lucas   2510001 Nov 19 21:04 ramdisk-recovery.img
drwxrwxr-x  3 lucas lucas      4096 Nov 19 21:02 recovery
-rw-r--r--  1 lucas lucas   8511488 Nov 19 21:04 recovery.img
drwxrwxr-x  9 lucas lucas      4096 Nov 19 21:01 root
drwxrwxr-x  5 lucas lucas      4096 Nov 19 20:59 symbols
drwxrwxr-x 15 lucas lucas      4096 Nov 19 21:01 system
-rw-r--r--  1 lucas lucas 314466532 Nov 19 21:14 system.img
-rw-r--r--  1 lucas lucas 100775392 Nov 19 20:46 userdata.img
➜  mako

Flashing

  1. Flash ClockworkMod recovery img. fastboot flash recovery recovery.img
  2. Flash
fastboot -w flashall

Building Kernel

  1. Building kernel from source https://android.googlesource.com/device/lge/mako/

  2. Or, using prebuilt kernel image https://android.googlesource.com/device/lge/mako-kernel/

Device

Proprietary Drivers

Binaries for Nexus Devices

https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/drivers

extract-files.sh

extract-broadcom-mako.sh

Restoring to factory state

Upgrade to Android 4.4 on Nexus 4

https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images?hl=fr-FR#occamkrt16s

Note: codename for factory image of Nexus 4 is occam.

Android product naming rules.

Questions

http://source.android.com/source/known-issues.html

References

  1. http://source.android.com/devices/index.html
  2. Youtube //www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/1_H4AlQaNa0?rel=0
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