Kernel Build for MNT Pocket Reform

💻 About the MNT Pocket Reform

The MNT Pocket Reform is a compact, portable laptop built on the principles of open hardware and user freedom.

At launch, the Pocket Reform shiped with the NXP i.MX8 M Plus SoC, a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor paired with a Cortex-M7 real-time core.

The team at MNT Research has done an amazing job documenting their open hardware platform, making this project possible. 🙌

Downloading & Booting

Releases will have both a kernel and Linux headers zip. The image-gen.sh script uses the kernel generated from a release to create a 120G sparse image & bmap file mnt-pocket-[ver]-aarch64.img.zst[.bmap]. See the docs for more info on bmap-tool.

sudo bmaptool copy path/to/mnt-pocket-[ver]-aarch64.img.zst /dev/sdX

You'll boot into an Arch Linux ARM filesystem. Users include root and alarm. Passwords are the same as the username.

👷 Building and Installing

You'll need some tooling:

required_tools = ['git', 'make', 'tar', 'aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc', 'patch']

Then run:

git clone https://github.com/cetola/mnt-build.git ~/mnt-build
cd ~/mnt-build
git submodule update --init --recursive

The first time you build, the config you need will probably not match the config in the repo. So at a minimum you'll want to build with the olddefconfig option:

./scripts/build.py --olddefconifg

See --help for more options.

Once the build is complete, you'll end up with a tarball containing the kernel, config, and some firmware. You can install these manually or use the PKGBUILD in Additional Tooling.

If you want headers for building out of tree modules:

./scripts/header-gen.py

Again, you can install manually, or use the Additional Tooling.

🔨 Additional Tooling

There are PKGBUILDs for both the kernel and kernel headers.

✏️ Notes

This is very much a work in progress. Do not try to build unless you are on a release tag. Even then, YMMV.

There is a container in the scripts directory if you happen to be building for Arch and care about toolchain skew.

These scripts are an automation of a full guide that I posted on the MNT Community Forum. See there for more details. See the Arch Linux Arm site to grab a filesystem and install manually.

If you use one of the provided images, know I have only tested on the i.MX8 M Plus MNT Pocket Reform. That being said, the kernel is patched with all patches from reform-debian-packages -> linux -> patches[ver]. As such it should boot on any MNT Reform platform. Be sure you have the correct device tree installed as the image and the PKGBUILD both install the i.MX8 M Plus dtb file.

🚀 Next Steps

The kernel tarball and accompanying PKGBUILD will install the reform2_lpc and wlan (qcacld) out-of-tree kernel modules for the i.MX8M Plus. That is a rather small but necessary part of reform-tools. Porting the rest of these tools to Arch will make the experience much easier. Perhaps not the point of Arch, but hey, one has to have goals. 😀