Arch Linux on beryllium (Xiaomi Poco F1)

Run Arch Linux natively on your Poco F1 without Halium.

Community

As more people are trying Arch Linux ARM on Poco F1, I see the need for a group to exchange and bug reports and help in general. The group can be reached under the bridged rooms https://matrix.to/#/#arch-beryllium:matrix.org and https://t.me/arch_beryllium.

Config

Available image names are: barebone, phosh, plasma-mobile, lomiri
Available panel types are: tianma, ebbg
Please use those values for <image name> and <panel type>

Building

To speed up package downloads you can use the LOCAL_MIRROR environment variable with and value like http://192.168.178.30:8080/\$repo/\$arch with https://github.com/arch-beryllium/mirror as local mirror tool.
(If you have used arch-repo-mirror previously for mirroring there is a quick migration guide available in the new repo).
Without it, you will probably wait for hours on every build, so it's highly recommended.

./build.sh <image name>

Copying the rootfs to a bootable location

Flashing onto SD card

You need at least an 8 GB SD card, but more is better.
Everything on the SD card will be deleted so watch out what you are doing.

./flash_sdcard.sh <image name> /dev/sdX

Using Jumpdrive

Download boot-xiaomi-beryllium-<panel type>.img from https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Jumpdrive/releases/latest. Go to bootloader mode and boot it using fastboot boot boot-xiaomi-beryllium-<panel type>.img.
When it booted you should see a splashscreen and some USB mass storage device exposed to your computer. If you have an SD card inserted it should also be exposed, but make sure to not chose it.
Find the device using fdisk -l (should show up as 53.51 GiB disk).

./push_jumpdrive.sh <image name> /dev/sdX

Using TWRP

It's better to use the installer method.
This will not overwrite anything (except an old rootfs image maybe).

./push_twrp.sh <image name>

Creating an TWRP zip installer

This basically does the same as pushing the rootfs on the userdata partition and flashing the boot partition, but in a much more user-friendly way.
When using this installer the boot partition gets flashed automatically, so be aware of this. It also means you can skip flashing the boot partition manually and directly boot it.

./make_installer.sh <image name> <panel type>
adb push build/<image name>-installer-<panel type>.zip /sdcard

In TWRP just install the zip as usual (You can also use adb shell twrp install /sdcard/<image name>-installer-<panel type>.zip)

Booting

Boot the device to bootloader mode (you might need to reboot it once to bootloader mode if you put the SD card into the device after it already booted to bootloader mode).

To temporarily boot use:

./boot.sh <image name> <panel type>

To permanently boot use:

./flash_boot.sh <image name> <panel type>

On the first boot it will take a longer time, because it resizes the rootfs to the full size. Please don't turn it off in that time.

SSHing into the device

Run this script to ssh into the device:

./ssh.sh

The default password is 123456.

Enable USB internet forwarding

This will block Wi-Fi on the device until rebooting.
Host side:

./enable_forwarding.sh

Device side:

sudo route add default gw 10.15.19.100

USB file transfer

This exposes / and any SD card that is not mounted at / to other devices as mass storage.
To enable run sudo usb-file-transfer.

Default apps

Usually only a terminal app and a software store will be installed by default. To install a set of default apps install apps-<image name>-meta manually.

QEMU

You can also run the image in QEMU:

./qemu.sh <image name>

It uses a qcow2 overlay image, so the rootfs won't be changed.
It also automatically forwards network requests, and you don't need to use ssh to get a shell, because script automatically opens a console for you.

Kernel updates

Device

When you flash the boot.img permanently, every kernel update on the device will flash the new boot.img onto the boot partition that is generated.
If you booted temporarily from a boot.img then the new boot.img won't be flashed onto the boot partition.

QEMU

The kernel update that is installed in the image won't be used, so you have to rebuild the image.

Anbox

Install and setup Anbox:

sudo pacman -S anbox anbox-image-aarch64 android-tools
sudo systemctl enable --now anbox-container-manager
systemctl enable --now --user anbox-session-manager

and then reboot.

Cross-compiling packages

If you want to cross-compile packages, you can use the cross_compile_package.sh or the host_compile_package.sh script from the https://github.com/arch-beryllium/beryllium-packages repo. You can pass all flags to the scripts that makepkg accepts.