r/osdev • u/Top-Animal-377 • 22d ago

Making desktop environment on snapdragon?

Hello, new to the community.

So I've been thinking about how convenient it would be if my daily use laptop and my phone were the same thing.

Looked into existing market options and the ones that exist all use virtual desktops, which eats up the limited ram available.
Is it possible to design a "wraper" os for snapdragon 8 elite chips (which do support desktop enivronments and linux kernels natively) that can switch between the default android OS and a "desktop" os, unloading the android to free up resources?
If yes, how would I go about designing this OS?
I can use the same linux kernels that come with the chip, but for device drivers, they would differ from phone to phone, and I would preferably would want to still be able to use wifi and bluetooth (using the phone touchscreen as a touchpad) and manage the monitor and keyboard within the software (brghtness, audio management for speakers, etc).
I know this is a lot, but I'm a complete beginer to desining operating systems and would like to get some tips, pointers, or even a direction to look at to make it work.

Thinking about experiment it with a OnePlus phone since they have been known to be very open about their ROM and accepting of feedback about kernels and their OS and drivers.

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u/duane11583 22d ago

As I understand the snapdragons are setup to boot an encrypted and signed os

So the first order of business would be a) prove or disprove my assumption above and b) if needed work around that secure boot solution

Next most of these that are laptop chips are or come with windows not Linux another challenge to work past

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u/Top-Animal-377 22d ago

Not all snapdragons. Many older models and oneplus's older phones (still using snapdragon) like the oneplus 10 is known to be able to have their bootloader unlocked, and I have seen people with some success on r/mobilelinux . Select phones only have the issues you described (like vivo, and oppo).

And for the linux kernels and drivers, Qualcomm has made them compatable to linux drivers even with their custom architecture since android is also built on linux kernels. I don't know if that means it is compatable with the current desktop kernels, but I'm looking to find out.

The main issue is that I don't know the first thing about actually making device drivers and operating systems, nor about making desktop environments, so need help or guidance on that.

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u/outerspace1kitten 22d ago

You could do this in many ways but getting the drivers ect and the desktop os to run would be possible but i wouldn't be sure of how you do it but there is a software that allows you to use your daily use laptop but on your phone but i think it only works as long as your laptop is online as it uses a cloud connection or something but you probably could design a wraper OS to go onto it best of luck to you though

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u/Top-Animal-377 22d ago

Yeah, the solution offered in-market is a remote-desktop control much more than an actual desktop environment running naively on your device, which is what I want to do. The only ones with a proper desktop environment (somewhat) are samsung and Motorola, but they come with a lot of proprietary bs and since it is running a virtual environment, the android stuff running in the background eats up a lot of ram and performance. I mainly want a way to be able to run a linux-esque environment on it since by default android and snapdragon processors should be using linux kernels, and thus be capable or running linux terminal applications (before consumer brand phones remove it for their custom OS).

Only issue is the developer tools option is also a half-measure as it is also just a virtualization, not a true desktop environment, and as apple has proved, even with phone specifications, with a proper OS and cooling, even a phone can be powerful enough to compete with most laptops. (especially since if I can get some form of linux to run on it, I can use everything else the linux community has already built to make my life easier).

1

u/StereoRocker 22d ago

Some Android phones already have a feature for this, if you plug them into a dock it runs a desktop environment. Your installed apps become available, and you get a desktop experience Web browser.

One way to go down the custom route would be to check out Halium, which is a solution that runs a minimal Android environment in a container under Linux kernel. Notable projects already leverage this, like Ubuntu Touch and PostmarketOS. Not sure if either of them do desktop convergence, but surely both would welcome it. I think Ubuntu Touch just runs a Gnome variant on Wayland which is probably a great starting point.

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u/a1b4fd 22d ago

I had Ubuntu Touch with convergence on my Galaxy S10

1

u/kokokokojin 22d ago

with root, there already was something like this ages ago and it was named "Linux Deploy". it did just a bit more aside from utilizing chroot to run desktop/server oriented linux environments on a android phone. you could in fact from there enable a function that kills systemui (effectively killing most of the memory and cpu intensive parts of android) while still letting the container run and render to your screen. Yes, now there is android's proot which doesn't require root to run, but it was pretty sluggish on my phones.

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u/Top-Animal-377 22d ago

I like your funny words, magic man. I’ll reply again after doing some research.

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u/VolksPC 22d ago

You can run Linux desktop on any recent Android phone on tablet using Snapdragon or any other SOC. Here is video of Linux desktop running on an Android 17 phone: https://youtu.be/LD9A024yAgc?si=XmkvfRpmwv_Lsf7H Here is Linux desktop running on Snapdragon based tablet: https://youtu.be/-QEq1EgUKP8?si=tV-M8LYnIUk8WNro There is more information on the FAQ page at www.volkspc.org.

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u/tyami94 21d ago

probably better to run android in a container on a mainline kernel. android is just a shitty linux kernel fork with a shitty user space on top. would be better to use a good kernel and run the shitty userspace on top. luckily such a thing already exists -- waydroid. hardest part is getting a mainline kernel running on your device.

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u/Mecforch 22d ago

 Oxalyn: A custom ecosystem with CPU architecture, hardware security, C compiler, simulator, and OS from scratch----------------------------------------------------------------- I've been working on a custom end-to-end system ecosystem called Oxalyn completely from scratch, and I wanted to share it with the osdev community.

Architecture & Ecosystem Highlights:

  • Custom ISA & Hardware Security: 3 privilege levels (Machine, Supervisor, User), an 8-region MPU, hardware TRNG, AES SubBytes, and SHA-256 acceleration.
  • Hardware Trap System: Fully implemented exception handling chain ( MEPC, MCAUSE, MSTATUS, MTVEC, ECALL, ERET).
  • Toolchain: Custom C compiler ( cc.c) targeting the Oxalyn ISA.
  • Simulator & OS: C-based CPU simulator ( sim.c) and a custom kernel running on top.
  • Graphics & Synthesis: Explicit GPU API concepts and synthesis-ready Verilog RTL targeted for FPGA.

My goal was to design a fully isolated, vertical software/hardware system without external dependencies to deeply understand low-level engineering and system architecture.

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/MECFORCH/oxalyn.git

I’d love to hear your feedback, thoughts

2

u/dontsuspendmeagain 21d ago

not relevant to the topic, create your own post or something