How I am planning a Cyanaogenmod 10.1 MediaTek Port

MediaTek, the SoC (System-on-a-Chip) manufacturer is pretty well known to be not open-source friendly at all. Even if you get to have a grasp on kernel source released by large vendors, it is unlikely that you will feel comfortable working with it. It is pretty much impossible at this point to move beyond Android 4.2.2 unless you have the proprietary sources of the hwcomposer stuff.

The Omni ROM team, FAEA and various other people are trying to get Cyanogenmod working on this. Omni decided to work with the hwcomposer stuff to allow shifting beyond Android 4.2.2 to 4.3 or KitKat. As an individual modder, since I do not have access to proprietary MediaTek source code of the MT6572 chipset, I decided to take another route. I thought of hacking the framework!

The Patchrom

Chinese ROM vendor Xiaomi (MIUI) released a toolchain called the “patchrom” which essentially involves disassembling Android frameworks (/system/framework/*) back to smali and applying patches to AOSP/CM base ROMs to make them “MIUI”. It is a pretty nifty approach if you really don’t have access to the source code of frameworks.

The problem with patchrom is the readability of the code. So, I downloaded Cyanogenmod 10.1 and AOSP 4.2.2_r1 sources, built them, disassembled them. And additionally decompiled them along with the framework MediaTek provides for, finding the changes (diff) and patching the AOSP / CM source where necessary.

This is my plan now, I don’t know whether it will work or not, but I do think it is worth a try.