Pinebook Pro: Build Notes

This page details things that are different/notable about the way in which elementary OS has been tweaked to run on the Pinebook Pro.

Kernel

Thanks to the great work that the Manjaro ARM team have done in this field, getting a working kernel for the Pinebook Pro was relatively painless. We've simply taken a mainline kernel straight from kernel.org, applied a few patches copied from the Manjaro repository and used a config set similar to the Manjaro one. It needed tweaking slightly to be compatible with the way Ubuntu/elementary works.

For example, we've had to disable kernel module compression in the kernel config as this isn't compatible with the Ubuntu update-initramfs scripts yet.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu hasn't released any kernels that are new enough or contain the necessary tweaks, options and patches to run on the Pinebook Pro yet. So this is one major area where the Pinebook Pro builds differ from the regular Intel/AMD builds. You'll notice that we're using kernel 5.7.11 currently, though this is likely to be upgraded to 5.8 soon (as it allows dropping some more patches that have been mainlined).

elementary normally relies heavily on the fantastic work done by Canonical in testing and maintaining kernel releases. So maintaining our own kernel configuration and patchset is a bit of a departure from that. Ubuntu already releases specific kernels for the Raspberry Pi, perhaps we'll see a ready made Pinebook Pro one in the future. In the short term however, we may consider packaging the Pinebook Pro kernel into a .deb and hosting it on a PPA, so we can push updates in future if necessary. Currently the kernel is just built into the image at build time.

Performance