I beg of thee.
For someone like me who is potentially looking at doing things with my smartphone every once in a while that require me to use literally anything but an ancient Linux 4.4 kernel it would be a blessing to actually be able to use kexec to just straight up boot another kernel including initramfs without anything at all touching the persistent storage.
At the end I can just reboot back into regular SailfishOS.
Now I understand that there are some hurdles to this.
For my phone specifically (Xperia XA2 Nile) which as far as I can tell uses the hybris-sony-aosp-8.1.0_r52_20190206 branch of android_kernel_sony_msm these are:
-
11647f99b4de6bc460e106e876f72fc7af3e54a6: absolutely optional but please fix compilation of DTC so that the Sailfish SDK is actually able to compile a kernel -
f9076ecfb1216a478312b1c078d04792df6d4477: a commit that reverts a removal of a feature which had been slated due to having no consumers at the time -
d28f6df1305a86715e4e7ea0f043ba01c0a0e8d9: kexec (doesn’t apply cleanly but is trivial to resolve) - and then actually enable that for all the kernels
You see, kexec for aarch64 specifically was introduced in 4.8 and us all being stuck on 4.4 is a pain.
With this I am certain that even you can benefit from faster development since you can have known-good booting phones for testing and then deploy the kernel on the fly to it and see whether it works.
Of course you may have other ways for doing that, just sayin’ that this would be really cool for the rest of us.