PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI
URL Source: https://postmarketos.org/blog/2026/02/26/pmOS-update-2026-02/ 
Title: postmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels
URL Source: https://postmarketos.org/blog/2026/02/26/pmOS-update-2026-02/
Published Time: Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:44:27 GMT
Markdown Content:
The biggest thing in February for postmarketOS was of course FOSDEM and our hackathon, about which we wrote a whole blog post already. Because of this, and the new approach outlined in the last monthly post, the blog post here is compareatively short.
- The PMCR 0009 about defining new requirements for the "main" device category is still in discussion but coming along nicely. The goal of this is to ensure that devices in _main_ will be reliable and will be set up to stay there for a long time, once they are in that category. Thanks to everybody who has given feedback so far!
- Our AI policy has been updated to explicitly forbid generative AI, and to be shorter and easier to understand (!49). Thanks, Oliver!
Trusted Contributors
- Bhushan is now a Trusted Contributor in postmarketOS! He has already been quite active in postmarketOS from 2018 to 2021 and has recently returned to KDE Plasma Mobile upstream development as well, which he has been doing for several years beforehand. Furthermore he is helping with improving certain mainline devices, such as the Fairphone 5 where he recently collaborated with Luca to get call audio from the speaker working for the first time!
- Minecrell stepped down as a TC. Among many other things, he was one of the initial maintainers that brought postmarketOS to Android phones, maintaining many of the MSM8916 devices), and the first one that enabled voice calls developing q6voiced. Minecrell is still available to answer questions and help guide people in the community in things that are part of his expertise.
- Anton stepped down as TC. He has pioneered Chromebook support in postmarketOS, implementing depthcharge support in pmbootstrap and many other things that were needed to make this possible. Furthermore he has been maintaining the port for the AYA Odin) game console, and mainlining it, and worked on many other great things in postmarketOS.
A warm welcome to Bhushan and a huge thanks to Minecrell and Anton for how they have pushed postmarketOS forward over the years in their roles as TC!
Contributor Support Programme: January 2026
The contributors in the CSP worked on the following tasks:
- Stefan had a busy month with more meetings and coordination than usual. He joined the GNOME Advisory Board before FOSDEM, helped draft the budget for 2026, worked on preparations for a project with Waag, and took part in an initramfs meeting. Other than that he balanced reviewing and working on pmaports and pmbootstrap with some work upstream on GTK and Phosh Mobile Settings.
- Clayton continued spending a sizeable amount of his time on postmarketOS immutable (duranium) but also did a lot of context-switchng to other projects. Clayton worked on coldbrew, a flatpak issue, Plymouth integration, infrastructure, zram swap, pipewire, pmbootstrap, sensor support, and kernel commandline handling! Go check his gitlab history if you want more details on that work.
- Pablo also had a busy month of meetings, moving governance topics forward and helping coordinate improvements across the project. He had meetings with an accountant, to setup the budget, with Alpine Linux maintainers and the Council, with the name change selection committee, and with an external entity to potentially work on audio improvements. In addition to that, he also spent quite some time on hardware CI preparations and documentation.
We now have nice generic kernel packages in postmarketOS:
linux-postmarketos-mainlinelinux-postmarketos-stablelinux-postmarketos-lts
_"These are kernels intended to work on a wide variety of devices and are the postmarketOS equivalents to Alpine kernels such as linux-stable or linux-lts. Having these kernels in postmarketOS means that we have full control over the kernel configuration and build process, which allows us to integrate them with our kernel configuration checks."_
Read the new documentation page for more information. Thanks, Aelin, Achill, Clayton!
_Some of this has happened before this month, but wasn't mentioned on the blog yet._
- Hardware CI: The phone-harness firmware has received various fixes, device configuration (!4), better CI checks (!3) and its docs are now rendered at docs.postmarketos.org/phone-harness together with new hardware-ci documentation pages. Thanks, Federico, Martin R., Pablo, Henrik!
- The OpenIMSD project now has a new QCOM baseband profile manager. Thanks, Lynxis!
- The new kde-nightly repo has successfully made it through the initial bootstrap and is now built every night (compared to the old repo, which was only updated sporadically). Thanks, Bart!
- The way to generate kernel command-lines has been reworked to be more flexible and elegant (!7708). Thanks, Clayton!
- dint, the _"postmarketOS deviceinfo validator, linter, and documentation generator"_ is now being used to generate the official deviceinfo reference (instead of having a separate wiki page that could go out-of-sync) and the underlying "one source of truth" deviceinfo_schema.toml has been moved to pamports.git so it can be adjusted together with making pmaports-wide deviceinfo changes (!7951). Thanks, Stefan!
- Good news for PinePhone users: Megapixels 2.1.0 is now in postmarketOS edge and includes a fix to make it work again on the original PinePhone. _"Performance is not as good as it used as it relies on software rendering but it can take photos at least, and it's markedly more usable than the main alternative Snapshot—which unfortunately runs at what seems to be less than 1 FPS on it"_ (!62, Fedi post). If somebody wants to dive into it, there's a suggestion to improve it a lot further. Thanks, Stefan!
The following people wrote patches that have been merged since the last monthly blog post. Thank you very much for improving postmarketOS!
Stefan, Aelin, Clayton, Achill, Pablo, Aster, Luca, bluebunny, Oliver, Fauzan, Bart, Henrik, Andreas, Jakko, Antoine, Federico, Damillora, Vladimir S., Gregory, Casey, Robert M., Brady, Scott, Sebastian F., Adam, Bhushan, askiiart, Ferass, Ingo, Jarico, alk3p, glats, Vladimir M., dikasp, Alicja, Neil, Victoria, cristian_ci, Nikita, Richard Ac., methanal, Daniel K., Rob, Val, Hugo, knuxify, Martin R., Marijn, Ermine, Violet/Multi, Jack, Barnabás, Yohan, yoxcu, Juan
Furthermore we thank everybody who has been contributing to any of the numerous upstream projects we use (Alpine Linux, Linux kernel, Phosh, Plasma (Mobile), GNOME (Mobile), Sxmo, ModemManager, and so many more!). And of course everybody who has helped out in other ways, such as helping others to run postmarketOS (e.g. in chats or IRL), improving documentation in the wiki, doing infrastructure and organizational work, or donating to postmarketOS.
You are the people who make this possible!
- We have a beginner-friendly task for contributing to postmarketOS in Python: pmbootstrap has some clean-ups that need to be done — in particular, migrating the remaining commands from the legacy frontend.py to the new "commands" module. See this patch for an example. Essentially, each command should have its own .py file and take a list of arguments instead of the whole "args" namespace.
- Several devices failed to build during v25.12 bringup. As Luca writes: _"Would be nice if someone could take the time to fix them up, I assume most are fairly trivial APKBUILD fixes to get them building again. But of course I don't expect anybody to take this up, but would be nice to not have to drop a bunch of devices"_. If you want to take a look, see !7512. We'll put the ones that are still failing into the _archived_ device category some time soon.
- You can send us topics to include in the next blog post by commenting in: #226
- If you appreciate the work we're doing with postmarketOS and want to support us, consider contributing financially via OpenCollective.
This blog post was written by Oliver. Header image by Luca, Oliver.