Newsletter #18 - February 2021 (Bugfixing & Android 11) (Patreon)

For those that didn't know yet, I've been busy working on the Android 10 bugs you've reported and an initial Android 11 test build this week.

It's my one week off from my regular day-job and, I figured, a good opportunity to get a lot of Patreon-related work done (as I tend to be way more productive having one big chunk of time rather than many small chunks over the weekends and after work).

So, let's talk about the Android 10 bugs first...

Android 10 & the Vulkan regression

A lot of you guys reported symptoms like random reboots and broken Vulkan rendering on Android 10, so I figured, given that this is the most wide-spread issue people are having so far, I would tackle this one first.

A majority of my time this week was spent debugging these symptoms.
From what I could gather after several lengthy debugging sessions is that, for one reason or another, the Vulkan pipeline fails to initialize on Android 10 (and 9 too to an extend).

All I really got out of it so far was a rather disappointing UF_INTERNAL (0x8) error, which is equivalent to "Something went wrong but we don't know what exactly".

At first I figured it might be some issue with the shader compilation, but after some additional debugging hours I found that, no matter which Vulkan API I call, all of them fail in a similar fashion.

Long story short: I still am unsure why Android 9 & 10 suffer from this Vulkan regression, but I keep on researching, as this is also the trigger for the random reboots some people have been reporting.

Onto Android 11 next...

Android 11 (aka. not as straight-forward as I figured it would be)

While some people love to make things sound complicated in an attempt to appear smart, I tend to prefer summarizing things in a way most people can follow what the actual problem is.

While I could go on forever explaining all the nitty-gritty details of upgrading an older device to a new Android revision, it all boils down to "Things change, sometimes more, sometimes less and less is always better as it introduces less work & problems".

The move from 7 to 8.1 was a gigantic one with drivers, HALs and pretty much every underlying component of Android needing a full swap / recode, which is why it took me so long to get us there.

The move from 8.1 to 9.0 was pretty small, in fact, 99% of the work I had done on 8.1 was instantaneously compatible with 9.0 (except for a few WiFi & BT related problems).

The move from 9.0 to 10.0 was pretty big and at certain points I was actually debating on whether I should go that route or just stick to 9.0 and "settle", but I couldn't leave it alone (as I'm too curious for my own good).

Sadly, with 11, things changed even more and the more I work on it the more it feels like my 9.0 to 10.0 move. A lot of work for comparatively little gain, but I will pull through regardless.

Onto... real-life!

The first winter in our new place is coming to an end!

In my previous newsletter I told you guys all about our new living situation, made possible in no small part by the support you guys provided to me here on Patreon.

My family and I relocated to our new small house just in time before Winter struck and for the first few weeks we were without a proper way to heat the place which left us with no choice but to go old-school and dress up like an Onion (Shirt, Sweater, Sweater, Sweater, Jacket, Blanket).

It was a humbling experience that made the delivery of our back-ordered heaters a very happy day (after DPD first sent them to the wrong country causing the whole debacle in the first place).

There were several more humbling experiences during this winter, from the back-door-frame busting on us, turning the place into a walk-in-freezer for 2 days, to some bad electric wiring needing replacement, etc. but, the weather seems to finally shift into more spring-like temperatures now and I hope that was it for the cold season.

This winter has shown me that there's a lot more to be done before this place is fully equipped to deal with the harsher times of the year, and several repairs are already in order, which means I won't be bored for a long time. (Hurray...)

And as always, I'll keep you all posted.

- Black-Seraph