I would love to port SailfishOS to the purism Librem 5. I have a secondhand unit to use for setup, testing, and integration. Would greatly appreciate pointers or anything that could help me get started. I don’t necessarily have the time to actively maintain a port. That being said, I would love to have SailfishOS running on my L5. Hopefully soon I can start back on Thai translation as well.
With respect to that I have a fundamental question (due to having no idea of the techniques required for porting): Shouldn’t an existing port for a device mainlined in the linux kernel (e.g. Pinephone) work for all mainlined phones (e.g. Librem5)?
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Possible. Device kernel configurations however are usually tailored to a single or a small set of similar devices, so even if the some kernel source tree or version supported either, you would at least have to use separate builds.
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The best place to start is to the documentation regarding hardware adaptation, which can be found at HW Adaptation | Sailfish OS Documentation. There is also an IRC channel on oftc.net named #sailfishos-porters if you need help.
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Unfortunately ARM systems are not as nice as standart x86 systems where hardware can be discovered via ACPI at run-time. So you need a device tree description of the hardware which is typically compiled into the kernel.
Also often there is still a collection of device specific hacks that have not been upstreamed yet and which need to be collected.
See here for the pine phone efforts:
and maybe take a look at the kernel used by postmarketos or similar for what patches are needed for librem5.
There’s also a telegram channel for sailfish on pine phone
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Unfortunately I have locked myself out of my Telegram, so I may create a new one soon-ish…