Root access required

I’m loving my Note Pro but, wince, the software could be so much better. I really want to help out and create something a bit different for this device and I think we all recognise that it’s unreasonable to expect Onyx to fulfill all of our wishes when they are a hardware manufacturer and not a software company.

From my experimentation, I’ve discovered that the hardware at a Linux level is almost identical to the reMarkable although the Note Pro has more RAM and faster CPU ! This means that it will be possible to do all the lovely things that they do like pencil like shading, pen tilting etc. I can already directly access the Wacom I2C hardware directly to get this but the framebuffer (required for zero latency updates) requires root.

With the next firmware, can we get an unlockable bootloader so we can install a custom bootloader and root the device or reflash the OS ? I realise that most people aren’t going to need this but it might help kickstart an ecosystem for these very promising devices.

1 Like

Hi, @azw409, you might want to try out the following link https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=294225
if we can get to a stage where we have a good ecosystem for these devices, it would be great.
Because it does’t seem like Boox is interested in doing this anytime soon.

Related topics:

Thanks for the pointers, I have what I need for now :wink:

Hi @azw409
Could you please explain how you managed root?

Thank you!

I don’t need a full root with all the unsafe malware that entails but just need a root exploit so i can get access to the framebuffer. You could build a root kit from this exploit but it would be a PITA to try and disable SELinux. We still need an unlockable bootloader via fastboot so we can do that sort of thing.

I could probably try to overwrite the recovery partition using the exploit but if it failed to boot then I’d have no way to recover and so I’m not going to try it !

I’m happy to grab the boot and system images if anybody wants them but I’m not going to risk writing to them.

Anyway I got libremarkable and the demo app running which includes pen input and font rendering. Unfortunately I need to sort out the framebuffer contention with Android because it rarely updates.

If you ever come up with a way to add shading etc I would pay money for it!