Ever happened to need building an old Hikey960 AOSP version (e.g. for supporting a customer stuck to that specific version) ? This could not be so easy, but there are some tricks that can help…
The real issue is that AOSP Hikey960 builds are supported only in master: any tagged version (e.g. android-9.0.0_r47, android-8.1.0_r66…) won’t likely work, so going back in time with tags can’t be done.
The solution is to use specific manifests to have a known working master snapshot: looks promising, but where to find those manifests?
Hikey960 AOSP old manifests
Luckily John Stultz, Linaro developer focused on 96boards, is maintaining a github repository with a list of known good manifests both for Hike960 and Hikey.
Those can be used to have a version that is not really a “released” version (e.g. you won’t have an official Android 8.x or Android 9) but something that is close to that. The advice is to check the release date of the Android version you are looking for and then use a manifest generated after that date.
Cooking a Pie
Let’s try, as an example, to have a build for Pie: this version has been released on August 6, 2018, so to be safe let’s take a manifest a few months after that date.
2018-10-25_17:47:40-pinned-manifest.xml can be a good one.
First of all, let’s init the repository:
repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest -b master
Then download 2018-10-25_17:47:40-pinned-manifest.xml and apply it:
cp 2018-10-25_17\:47\:40-pinned-manifest.xml .repo/manifests/
Finally it’s time to sync the repo:
repo sync -f -j24 -m 2018-10-25_17\:47\:40-pinned-manifest.xml
After a while you can start building AOSP for your Hikey960 as usual but, instead than master, you will have your chosen version.
If you, instead, want Oreo, a good manifest could be 2018-03-27_14:55:46-pinned-manifest.xml
Unfortunately at the moment of writing seems like there are no manifests for versions older than oreo, so if you need one I’m afraid that you are on your own.
I’ll write soon another post explaining how to enable Telephony feature to the Hikey build with Pie, as previously done for Android 8.