Device Updates – M9

With the release of CM11 M9 over the
weekend, this is a perfect opportunity to
touch base on a couple of device support
related items, and information that may be
relevant to many of you.
Device status roster
One of the more common questions asked
after every M-release is with regards to the
status of any one particular device in general
– usually one that missed the M release
mark. To help give you a central place to
check up on this information, we’ve created
the Device Status page on our wiki. This page
will be updated alongside each monthly
release to include an assessment of currently
supported devices and what (if any) reasons
prevented its release for that particular
month. This can be simply because of time
constraints for your maintainers or something
more severe such as known blockers and
bugs.
Jewel
Some of you may have noticed that jewel was
pulled from nightlies after build 20140729.
Unfortunately, some modem issues were too
unwieldy to throw in a quick fix. These issues
are resolved after upgrading the firmware on
jewel to version 4.13.651.4, however,
updating to this new firmware also includes a
big caveat – the data/media transition.
This firmware upgrade was not an easy
decision – one of CM’s features has been
your ability to update on top of your previous
build without data loss. However, there is no
data migration path from an existing
CyanogenMod installation when updating to
the new 4.13.651.4 firmware. Updating your
firmware will wipe all of your data,
applications, and anything stored on /sdcard.
Ultimately, this is the best (and only) path
forward for continued support of
CyanogenMod on jewel.
More information on this topic and a firmware
update guide has been posted to the wiki:
Jewel data/media transition . Discussion and
help on this topic should be directed to this
forum thread .
Jewel nightlies resume beginning with build
20140806 and require a minimum bootloader
(HBOOT) version of 2.10.0000 to install.
Moto_msm8960
Over the past month or so, Motorola has
released 4.4 firmware updates that introduce
substantial updates to a couple of the devices
under the moto_msm8960 umbrella. To-date,
this includes the xt926 and xt907 devices,
with updates bringing in new bootloaders and
modem firmware. On July 1st, CM moved
nightly code for the msm8960 to require the
4.4 dependency, under the expectation that
Motorola would continue to roll out the 4.4
updates to their other devices – this proved
wrong, with Moto going as far to confirm
cancellation of the expected xt897 4.4 update.
As a result, many devices supported under
the moto_msm8960 are still using Jellybean
bootloaders, and could not update to the
latest CM 11 builds. To rectify this issue, we
have decided to split the moto_msm8960
family into Kitkat (4.4) bootloader and and
Jellybean bootloader releases. A new
moto_msm8960_jbbl (Jellybean bootloader)
variant has been created in CM sources to
account for those devices that have not (and
may not) see a proper 4.4 release from Moto.
Builds for this variant are already available on
our downloads portal, and will install as
proper updates (no need to wipe) for those
that could not use the normal
‘moto_msm8960′ builds since the July 1st
switch to 4.4 based code.
No further changes are required on your part,
simply grab the right build as it applies to you
(based on your bootloader).