VibeXperia — LineageOS 15.1 (Android 8.1) for the Sony Xperia M (nicki)

An experimental, working revival of LineageOS 15.1 / Android 8.1.0 on the 2013 Sony Xperia M (codename nicki, Qualcomm MSM8227, dual Cortex‑A5, Adreno 305, ~880 MB RAM, Linux 3.4 kernel). The upstream 15.1 device tree compiled but never booted; this brings it all the way up to a daily‑usable state.

Hobby port. SELinux is currently permissive.

What works

Area	Status
Boot to launcher (Trebuchet), Settings, touch, brightness	✅
ADB (recovery and booted) + USB/PC charging	✅
Suspend / resume (instant wake + touch)	✅
Wi‑Fi (assoc, IPv4/IPv6, DNS, autoconnect, signal bars)	✅
Audio + video playback	✅
Sensors 5/5 (accel, prox, mag, orient, light + fused rotation)	✅
Telephony / RIL (insert a SIM)	✅
Camera — enumerate + open + live preview + photo capture	✅
Web browser (Jelly / Android WebView)	✅
Landscape rotation + notification shade	✅
Notification LED, performance‑profile picker, baseband, BT MAC	✅
SELinux enforcing	⚠️ permissive (parked)
Microphone ~10 kHz whine	⚠️ hardware coupling (deferred)

Highlights of what it took

Oreo on a 2013 CAF 3.4 kernel needed real kernel work, not just config:

• binder: backported multiple /dev instances (hwbinder/vndbinder) and scatter‑gather (BINDER_TYPE_PTR/FDA, BC_TRANSACTION_SG) — the make‑or‑break for Oreo HIDL.
• timerfd / alarmtimer: CLOCK_BOOTTIME + *_ALARM so wake‑alarms work.
• PR_CAP_AMBIENT: ambient capabilities so crash_dump produces tombstones.
• net: NL80211_ATTR_MAC + lenient rtnetlink attr parsing to unblock Oreo netd routing/DNS.
• display: fixed the early‑suspend vs Oreo‑HWC resume deadlock.
• camera: 4 fixes in the HAL1 shim (hardware/interfaces) — usage sign‑extension, gralloc‑lock of preview buffers, registerMemory bypass, and a single‑open cookie‑recovery that fixes the snapshot SIGSEGV.

Full blow‑by‑blow in 15.1-BUILD-NOTES.md.

Repo layout

device/sony/nicki/      Device tree (this repo)
patches/                Changes to upstream LineageOS repos, one .patch each
local_manifests/        repo manifest fragment (pulls the kernel + vendor blobs)
15.1-BUILD-NOTES.md     Detailed bring-up log

Kernel lives in a separate repo: android_kernel_sony_msm8x27 (branch lineage-15.1-nicki).

Proprietary Sony/Qualcomm blobs are not included — pull them from TheMuppets (lineage-15.1).

Building

# 1. LineageOS 15.1 sources
repo init -u https://github.com/LineageOS/android.git -b lineage-15.1

# 2. add this manifest fragment (kernel + vendor blobs + qcom/sony common)
cp local_manifests/nicki.xml .repo/local_manifests/
repo sync

# 3. drop in the device tree from this repo
cp -a device/sony/nicki <android_root>/device/sony/

# 4. apply the upstream patches (filename = target project path, '_' -> '/')
#    e.g. patches/android_hardware_interfaces.patch -> hardware/interfaces
(cd hardware/interfaces && git apply .../patches/android_hardware_interfaces.patch)
#    ...repeat for each patch

# 5. build
. build/envsetup.sh && brunch nicki

Gotchas (see 15.1-BUILD-NOTES.md): recovery is flashed to the boot partition (fastboot flash boot recovery.img); for a clean wipe mke2fs userdata in recovery; the device is non‑Treble (vendor under /system).

Credits

Based on the LineageOS 15.1 nicki device tree (droncheg) and the LineageOS project. Bring‑up by @RandomTypek, with debugging assistance from Claude (Anthropic).