GPD XD+ Android 9 Progress Report (Patreon)

For those that follow the newsletter: You already know that the partition table changes, vendor and boot images all have been prepared already and that my sacrificial GPD XD+ unit is pretty much primed for the real porting work to begin.

As such I am currently digging myself through boot errors, blobs that need patching, selinux policy updates, etc... but how do I know what to change / patch / fix when the unit won't even boot at this stage?

This is where this little modification of mine became necessary.

What you are seeing here is a properly soldered (as in working) single-direction (TX -> RX) UART serial port wire-up.

Using this little modification of mine I can essentially see what my device is doing at all times by hooking up these two wires to a USB FTDI reader I have sitting on my desk.

Particularly interesting are the early-boot logs which I can capture this way (which shed some light onto what still needs patching / fixing).

The way it is right now this unit won't be winning a beauty contest anytime soon but it will give me the necessary information I need to drive this project forward and help in securing us this sweet sweet Android 9 upgrade.

I will keep you all posted, as always.

- Black-Seraph