# August and September 2020 round-up

DevFeed: [August and September 2020 round-up](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/august-and-september-2020-round-up-32465.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://mobile.nixos.org/news/2020-10-06-august-september-round-up.html>)

Author: Samuel Dionne-Riel

Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00Z

Content type: news

Language: en

Sources: [Mobile NixOS news](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/mobile-nixos-news.md>)

Topics: [Mobile](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/mobile.md>), [Tooling](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/tooling.md>), [Kernel](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/kernel.md>), [Pull Request](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/pull-request.md>)

Tags: [kernel-builder](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/kernel-builder.md>), [pull-request](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/pull-request.md>), [series](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/series.md>), [tooling](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tooling.md>), [update](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/update.md>)

## AI overview

This tenth Mobile NixOS project update covers merged changes from August and September 2020, including forced kernel configuration normalization, the experimental Autoporter tooling for device porting, and one completed port.

## Source excerpt

This update is the tenth in a series of regular updates on the state of the project. Only changes that have been accepted and merged in Mobile NixOS are chronicled here. There's always more work currently in-progress. Notable changes As with the last update, a big part of the 10 pull requests merged were bug fixes or minor changes. Here's a quick look at some of the nicer things achieved. Forced kernel configuration normalization The kernel-builder infrastructure now forces the configuration file used in its build to be normalized. What is normalization? Simply put, it's about updating the kernel configuration file so all of the options represent the values set in the current kernel build. This is a somewhat breaking change, as it forces kernel configurations to be kept up to date even if no changes were made by the maintainer. Though this makes the final build somewhat more declarative, as options removed and new options will be reflected in the kernel configuration in the repository. Autoporter The new Mobile NixOS Autoporter project is an experimental tooling intended to expedite the first step in porting to a new device. In a few words, it finds as many facts about a given device as it can. The current implementation uses pre-expanded factory images from OEM, but plans are in the work to work from files the user provide instead or in addition of. This enables the porter-developer to start from known true values for the device, rather than needing them to find out those values. The more valuable ones are the subtle ones, like the USB gadget modes, or system as root. It does not provide a complete skeleton yet. Mainly for now it's missing the kernel derivation. Though we might be able to provide likely source locations depending on some factors. All of this is not theoretical. We already have one port done through following this process! Look at the pull request #205 where the commits also tries to show the work that was needed to go from the skeleton files to a w