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).