Mastodawn

New blog post introducing the WIP Duranium project (immutable postmarketOS), some of its major features, and explaining why some design decisions were made.

> Either the new image works, or the system falls back to the previous one automatically. No partially-applied state. No debugging audio when you need to make a phone call and no fussing with a broken web browser when you just want to doomscroll cat photos. It also means developers can reproduce the exact state of a user's device, making it much easier to track down and fix issues.

https://postmarketos.org/blog/2026/03/17/introducing-duranium/

#linuxmobile #postmarketos #duranium

Introducing Duranium: a more reliable postmarketOS

Aiming for a 10 year life-cycle for smartphones

postmarketOS

@postmarketOS perhaps the project logo can be a durian

Ivan Molodetskikh 1d ago

@postmarketOS how does "No debugging audio when you need to make a phone call and no fussing with a broken web browser" follow from "the system boots successfully"? The system may boot successfully with a broken audio and/or a broken web browser. I'm curious and didn't find it in the blog post

Alexia ΘΔ 1d ago

the idea is that faults like this can be discovered before an update is applied as it's much easier to replicate and test the images, and a partial-upgrade state (which might break something like audio) is entirely avoided as updates are effectively atomic

Ivan Molodetskikh 1d ago

@alexia @postmarketOS broken audio makes me think primarily about audio being broken on particular hardware due to an unaccounted edge case. Doesn't that mean that you can test an image on some hardware or even a few different phones, but still miss it being broken on some particular other audio chip?

Alexia ΘΔ 1d ago

perhaps but the aim of the project is moreso to prevent situations in which audio was working and then broke after an update without an easy recovery path.

Ivan Molodetskikh 1d ago

@alexia @postmarketOS but this is still possible, as I just described?

@YaLTeR @alexia that's why we're also building automated testing which will include automated testing of audio and phone calls.

eventually we hope to have a comprehensive test suite that every update must pass on every device before it gets shipped

Jordan Petridis 1d ago

@cas @YaLTeR @alexia You can also mark a boot as failed if pipewire is crashing, won't catch everything but its more than now

Ivan Molodetskikh 1d ago

@alatiera @cas @alexia maybe you can run some audio smoke test at boot and rollback if it fails?

Jordan Petridis 1d ago

@YaLTeR @cas @alexia You don't even need that, systemd has a built-in way of handling this.

https://systemd.io/AUTOMATIC_BOOT_ASSESSMENT/

Automatic Boot Assessment

the esoteric programmer 1d ago

@alatiera @YaLTeR @cas @alexia that would also deal with pipewire failing, or selecting the wrong audio device all of a sudden, or stuff like that?

Jordan Petridis 1d ago

@esoteric_programmer @YaLTeR @cas @alexia It would deal with the service failing or crashing, but it wouldn't catch logic bugs like that

WeirdTreeThing 1d ago

@YaLTeR @postmarketOS If an update breaks something such as audio, you have the option to roll back to the previous version without the issue.

UndeadLeech 1d ago

@YaLTeR @postmarketOS Well the audio would have to work reliably in the first place. 😅

pabloyoyoista 1d ago

@YaLTeR part of it is that we have an unexpectedly high number of audio failures consequence of partially-applied state and buggy upgrades. Why it's always audio 🤷 You can still get an update with broken audio if Pipewire or ALSA broke for your device. But then it should be reproducible in all upgrades/installs, which has really not been the case so far, speeding up fixes @postmarketOS

Jonathan Frederickson 1d ago

@postmarketOS Interesting! I have a FP5 that I'm not currently daily driving and I see there's an image for it, so might need to give it a try

I'm curious if it would be possible to run Guix on it... the docs say there's nothing stopping you from running Nix on it but Guix like Nix requires a writable store dir. Going to have to dig into this some more later

PureTryOut 21h ago

@jfred @postmarketOS As long as that directory doesn't need to be on /usr, it'll work just fine.

@postmarketOS can i flush it via web flusher?