FM-radio Xperia XA2

Hardware Adaptation
#1

Will it ever be possible to use the FM-radio on the Xperia XA2?

Why is there no FM radio choice in the media player?

I know this has been brought up at together for Jolla but it would be a neat thing to have access to.

/Martin Book

21 Likes
#2

I am also waiting for FM Radio Support. For Sony XA2 AND Xperia X.
What is the problem to implement this feature? Even the Aqua Fish had or have
still radio support.
Naalaa

4 Likes
#3

May be have a look on this thread ?
https://together.jolla.com/question/211927/any-chance-of-getting-the-radio-fm-working-on-sailfish-x-for-sony-xa2/

1 Like
#4

I know, but it is an old thread on the old forum. There is no thread about this in the current Sailfish Forum, that is why I posted it here.

Cordially

Where is the content from together.jolla.com (TJC)?
#5

Fully understandable.
And just due to the mistake of @Jolla to open this forum not having prepared the transfer of old entres from TJC.
See this (and links):

#6

Thank you for pointing that out. I should have read those first posts on the forum to know how to behave.

However, the post on the old forum is one year old and so are most comments.

I felt that the topic needed an updated post so as to make Jolla understand that we still want all the hardware functioning properly. There aren’t really any answers to the topic question either; only comments about how others want it, too, and someone saying it cannot be done on the Xperia X.

Just realized that there is a text under the title saying that Jolla is following the post.

1 Like
#7

Any news about the fm radio? Are there other possibilities apart from official system updates?

#8

Yes, streaming is one thing but a real FM radio would be great.
The hardware is present. So where is the ON switch?

3 Likes
#9

I think it is extremely unlikely that Jolla will ever fix this issue on the XA2, any more than they will fix the GPS issue. Sailfish has been implemented on the XA2 for quite a few years now, so if they were going to fix these problems (or could fix these problems) then I’m sure they would have done so by now. Their focus has now moved on to newer phones, so for issues just affecting the XA2 model implementation of SFOS only, this is probably as good as it gets.

#10

Yes this is understandable.
But some hints?
For the community to try things,
There are probably guys there with some ideas of what could be tried for FM and GPS.
They could just throw what they know, maybe someone can try something, maybe not.
C’mon ! :wink: :upside_down_face: :slightly_smiling_face:

2 Likes
#11

If you would like to start looking into this you might take a look at Pirate FM by kimmoli on openrepos.

But iirc this was working well on JollaC but -and here my memory overflows- not or only very very weakly on XA2 (do not have wired headphones at hand to test).

1 Like
#12

Thanks for the hint.
Unfortunately, it is not working on my XA2.
Frequency stays at 0 and when launched from terminal, it says:

[D] unknown:0 - Using Wayland-EGL
[W] unknown:0 - defaultServiceProvider::requestServic
e(): no service found for - “org.qt-project.qt.radio”

#13

Xperia AX2 is still a great phone. I installed Sailfish two years ago and I have a great time. For some time, with the 3/4 version the GPS has not worked or, precisely, the apps that use maps do not work. Only the GPSinfo program works.

#14

I think that kernel driver for Iris Radio is missing from kernel, that will be needed also to get FM Radio working on Xperia XA2.

#15

unfortunately also not working on X10 / SFOS 4.3 . App Installed without errors, icon visible in app grid, app starts but Freq. display shows 0.0 and buttons do nothing.
Deinstallation after this failed try also without problems.

#16

FM Radio for Xperia X is already available on Sony AOSP with kernel 3.10: > https://developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/get-started/supported-devices-and-functionality/current-platform-functionality-maintained/

Same with Xperia XA2, where FM Radio is in the AOSP program: https://github.com/sonyxperiadev/vendor-qcom-opensource-fm

Even looking deeper, a quick search shows /dev/msm_fm on the main branch

Not sure what the content of this post on TJC means. I checked this repo on github, but it only contains Java software, no open source driver. No idea what mailnine means here either, I see no mention of ‘msm_fm’ in the linux kernel source of 5.16-rc7.
The website for Open Devices is quite clear, no support for FM radio.
If someone does find the way in this rabbit hole, please explain :slight_smile:
For now I assume the driver is closed source and not allowed to be distributed due to Qualcom licensing, but I hope to be wrong in this assumption.

Edit:
Checked this out:
https://developer.sony.com/file/download/software-binaries-for-aosp-android-11-0-kernel-4-14-nile/
Tried grep for ‘msm_fm’ and ‘/dev/radio’ but found nothing as well.

1 Like
#17

Iris Radio driver needs to be ported to XA2 kernel. It can be found from here for example…

2 Likes
#18

Ah, thank you, that makes sense.
I suppose porting means backporting from current to 4.10 or 4.14.
I am not a C developer, I could only hope to stare at compile errors :slight_smile:

#19

THanks for this deeper insight.
Alas, it is over my head to port anything anywhere…

#20

Oh wow, I thought I could just take a look and try if I can get anywhere.
I do know how to patch a kernel tree with a new driver, but this rabbit hole of embedded programming and esoteric ways of building is way too far into bizarro world for me :slight_smile:
And here I was hoping it is just a module that can be loaded with modprobe, the way a standard linux distro would have a kernel rpm with patches :slight_smile:

I guess this needs someone competent :slight_smile: I will quietly step away.