postmarketOS (abbreviated as pmOS) is an

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

primarily for

smartphone A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whic ...

s, based on the

Alpine Linux Alpine Linux is a Linux distribution designed to be small, simple and secure. Alpine Linux uses musl, BusyBox and OpenRC instead of the more commonly used glibc, GNU Core Utilities and systemd respectively.

distribution. postmarketOS was launched on 26 May 2017 with the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

available on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

before migrating to

GitLab GitLab Inc. is an open-core company that operates GitLab, a DevOps software package which can develop, secure, and operate software. The open source software project was created by Ukrainian developer Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Dutch developer S ...

in 2018. It is capable of running different X and Wayland based user interfaces, such as

Plasma Mobile Plasma Mobile is a Plasma variant for smartphones. It is currently available for the Pinephone, and supported devices for postmarketOS such as the OnePlus 6. It is shipped by several Linux distributions, such as postmarketOS and Manjaro. Hist ...

MATE Mate may refer to: Science * Mate, one of a pair of animals involved in: ** Mate choice, intersexual selection ** Mating * Multi-antimicrobial extrusion protein, or MATE, an efflux transporter family of proteins Person or title * Friendship ...

GNOME 3 GNOME 3 is the third major release of the GNOME desktop environment. A major departure from technologies implemented by its predecessors, GNOME 3 introduced a dramatically different user interface. It was the first GNOME release to utilize a unif ...

, and XFCE; later updates added support for

Unity8 Ubuntu Touch is a mobile version of the Ubuntu operating system, being developed by the UBports community. Its user interface is written in Qt, and is designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers, ...

and

Phosh Phosh (portmanteau of '' phone'' and ''shell'') is a graphical user interface designed for mobile and touch-based devices. It is the default shell used on several mobile Linux operating systems including PureOS, Mobian, and Fedora Mobility. It ...

. It is also capable of running Docker, if the device specific kernel has

cgroups cgroups (abbreviated from control groups) is a Linux kernel feature that limits, accounts for, and isolates the resource usage (CPU, memory, disk I/O, network, etc.) of a collection of processes. Engineers at Google started the work on this ...

and relevant configs enabled. The project aims to provide a ten-year lifecycle for smartphones.

Architecture

Unlike many other projects porting conventional Linux distributions to Android phones, postmarketOS does not use the Android build system or

userspace A modern computer operating system usually segregates virtual memory into user space and kernel space. Primarily, this separation serves to provide memory protection and hardware protection from malicious or errant software behaviour. Kernel ...

. Each phone has only one unique package, and flashable installation images are generated using the pmbootstrap tool. The project intends to support the mainline

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...

on all phones in the future, instead of the often outdated Android-specific fork, to reduce the potential for security exploits. A few devices can boot into the mainline kernel already. The project aims to support Android apps, originally through the use of

Anbox Anbox is a free and open-source compatibility layer that aims to allow mobile applications and mobile games developed for Android to run on Linux distributions. Canonical introduced Anbox Cloud, for running Android applications in a cloud enviro ...

, which was replaced by Waydroid since postmarketOS v21.12.

was chosen as the base distribution due to its low storage requirements, making it more suitable for older devices. Excluding the kernel, a base installation takes up approximately 6 MB.

State of development

Features

Different tools have been published by the project, including: * pmbootstrap, a utility to help the process of development with cross compilation; * osk-sdl, a

virtual keyboard A virtual keyboard is a software component that allows the Input device, input of characters without the need for physical keys. The interaction with the virtual Computer keyboard, keyboard happens mostly via a touchscreen interface, but can also ...

to allow decryption of a password during startup (on a device with full disk encryption); * charging-sdl, an application contained in the

initramfs In Linux systems, initrd (''initial ramdisk'') is a scheme for loading a temporary root file system into memory, to be used as part of the Linux startup process. initrd and initramfs refer to two different methods of achieving this. Both are comm ...

to display an animation when the phone is charging while off.

Device support

As of May 2020, over two hundred devices are able to boot the operating system, including 92 with WiFi support. This includes many smartphones and tablets that originally ran Android, as well as some Linux-based Nokia smartphones, such as the

N900 The Nokia N900 is a smartphone made by Nokia. It supersedes the Nokia N810. Its default operating system, Maemo 5, is a Linux-based OS originally developed for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. It is the first Nokia device based upon the Texas I ...

and N9. After Corellium's Project Sandcastle ported the Linux kernel to some iPhone versions, postmarketOS was also seen to boot on it, although no persistent flashing is supported at the moment. As of May 2021, support for wearable devices (including

Google Glass Google Glass, or simply Glass, is a brand of smart glasses developed and sold by Google. It was developed by X (previously Google X), with the mission of producing an ubiquitous computer. Google Glass displays information to the wearer using ...

and

smartwatches A smartwatch is a wearable computer in the form of a watch; modern smartwatches provide a local touchscreen interface for daily use, while an associated smartphone app provides management and telemetry, such as long-term biomonitoring. While ea ...

like the

LG G Watch The LG G Watch (model W100, codenamed Dory) is an Android Wear-based smartwatch announced and released by LG and Google on June 25, 2014. It was released along with the Samsung Gear Live as launch devices for Android Wear, a modified version of ...

) has been improved through integration with the

AsteroidOS AsteroidOS is an open source operating system designed for smartwatches. It is available as a firmware replacement for some Android Wear devices. The motto for the AsteroidOS project is "Hack your wrist." Wareable.com reviewed version 1.0 and gav ...

user interface and work on mainline kernel for the

LG G Watch R The LG G Watch R (model W110) is an Android Wear-based smartwatch announced and released by LG and Google on October 25, 2014.

. In 2018, no devices were yet able to make phone calls with postmarketOS, although significant efforts were being made in this regard. By 2020, a number of devices were fully or mostly supported, including for phone calls, SMS messages and mobile data. These included the

BQ Aquaris X5 The becquerel (; symbol: Bq) is the unit of radioactivity in the International System of Units (SI). One becquerel is defined as the activity of a quantity of radioactive material in which one nucleus decays per second. For applications relat ...

Librem 5 The Librem 5 is a smartphone manufactured by Purism that is part of their Librem line of products. The phone is designed with the goal of using free software whenever possible, includes PureOS, a Linux operating system, by default, and as of 2021 ...

Nokia N900 The Nokia N900 is a smartphone made by Nokia. It supersedes the Nokia N810. Its default operating system, Maemo 5, is a Linux-based OS originally developed for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. It is the first Nokia device based upon the Texas In ...

, Motorola Moto G4 Play,

Samsung Galaxy A3 Samsung Galaxy A3 refers to three Samsung Galaxy Android smart phones released in the 2010s. These are: * Samsung Galaxy A3 (2014); Android smartphone unveiled in October 2014, released in December 2014. * Samsung Galaxy A3 (2015); Android smartph ...

(2015), Samsung Galaxy A5 (2015), and Wileyfox Swift. Furthermore, the device was launched as a first-party operating system for the PinePhone, with the postmarketOS Community Edition.

Porting to a new device

The development process to make a new device compatible with the operating system consists of creating a phone-specific package using the pmbootstrap tool. For that, the use of the Linux kernel from the device's original manufacturer is often necessary. The source code of the original kernel is often made available by compliance with the requirements of the

GPLv2 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

license, but some drivers necessary for the operation of the device may not be available, and must, therefore, be recreated. Examples include GPU drivers such as

Lima Lima ( ; ), originally founded as Ciudad de Los Reyes (City of The Kings) is the capital and the largest city of Peru. It is located in the valleys of the Chillón River, Chillón, Rímac River, Rímac and Lurín Rivers, in the desert zone of t ...

, which has a proprietary equivalent in userspace on Android that is not subject to the GPLv2 requirements.

Gallery

File:Asus-z010d-postmarketOS.jpg,

running on the Asus Zenfone Max File:Plasma-mobile-hammerhead 01.jpg,

on the

Nexus 5 Nexus 5 (code-named Hammerhead) is an Android smartphone sold by Google and manufactured by LG Electronics. It is the fifth generation of the Nexus series, succeeding the Nexus 4. It was unveiled on October 31, 2013 and served as the launc ...

File:Asus flo hildon.jpg,

Hildon Hildon is an application framework originally developed for mobile devices ( PDAs, mobile phones, etc.) running the Linux operating system as well as the Symbian operating system. The Symbian variant of Hildon was discontinued with the cancella ...

on the

Nexus 7 (2013) The second-generation Nexus 7, also commonly referred to as the Nexus 7 (2013), is a mini tablet computer co-developed by Google and Asus that runs the Android operating system. It is the second of three tablets in the Google Nexus tablet ...

File:N9 xfce4.jpg, XFCE on the

Nokia N9 The Nokia N9 (codename '' Lankku'') is a flagship smartphone developed by Nokia, running on the Linux-based MeeGo mobile operating system. Announced in June 2011 and released in September, it was the first and only device from Nokia with MeeGo, ...

File:PostmarketOS and Weston compositor running on Motorola Moto G.jpg,

Weston Weston may refer to: Places Australia * Weston, Australian Capital Territory, a suburb of Canberra * Weston, New South Wales * Weston Creek, a residential district of Canberra * Weston Park, Canberra, a park Canada * Weston, Nova Scotia * ...

(Wayland compositor demo) on the

Moto G Motorola Moto is a range of Android mobile devices manufactured by Motorola Mobility, a subsidiary of Lenovo. The Moto brand is also used and marketed for certain public-safety products from Motorola Solutions and by Motorola brand licensees on ce ...

File:LuneOS Browser.png,

LuneOS LuneOS is a mobile operating system (OS) based on the Linux kernel and currently developed by WebOS Ports community. With a user interface based on direct manipulation, LuneOS is designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphon ...

UI running on a generic x86 tablet

References

External links

*
Source code
on

{{Mobile operating systems Embedded Linux distributions Free mobile software Linux distributions without systemd Linux distributions Mobile Linux Software forks