Canting is a security-focused Android kernel based on Google’s kernel-common and CAF, named after a traditional batik tool.

Source Codes

xiaomi-msm8953

xiaomi-sdm845

Features

• Upstream with latest linux-stable releases
• Upstream with latest CAF-kernel releases
• Clang supported
• CPU Governors: schedutil, powersave, performance
• I/O Schedulers: noop, cfq
• Compat vDSO from Pixel kernel
• TCP Congestion Algorithm: bbr, westwood, reno, cubic
• WireGuard VPN support
• Boeffla wakelock blocker
• Simple Low Memory Killer
• Sound Control: Speaker, Microphone, Headphone (Per-channel control)
• KCAL & KLapse Interface
• Vibration Intensity Control
• backlight min option
• Removed safetynet flags (no need of magisk to bypass safteynet)
• Extend File System Support: F2FS, EXFAT, NTFS
• and many more

Device Support

canting-3.18.y

• MSM8953 abandoned
  • Redmi Note 4X
  • Mi A1

canting-4.9.y

• MSM8953
  • Mi A1
• SDM845
  • canting-4.9 for Mi 8
  • canting-4.9 for Mi Mix 2S
  • canting-4.9 for Poco F1

How to Build

This section describes how to set up your local work environment to build the Canting Kernel. You must use Ubuntu/Debian.

Set-up Environment

1. Instal required packaged for Ubuntu based distro, according to the source.android.com and xdaforums.com. Install the following packaged:

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sudo apt-get install git ccache automake lzop bison gperf build-essential zip curl zlib1g-dev zlib1g-dev:i386 g++-multilib python-networkx libxml2-utils bzip2 libbz2-dev libbz2-1.0 libghc-bzlib-dev squashfs-tools pngcrush schedtool dpkg-dev liblz4-tool make optipng

2. Clone the kernel trees For an example, we are going to build canting-4.9.q for sdm845 into canting as directiories:

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git clone https://github.com/khusika/canting_kernel_xiaomi_sdm845 -b canting-4.9-q canting

  3. Clone required toolchain, at this point only Clang with prebuilt binutils(arm and arm64) in it to build canting-kernel.

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git clone https://github.com/khusika/prebuilt_google_clang -b master clang-toolchain

Compile Kernel

1. Make sure to clean the kernel trees

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make clean && make mrproper

  2. Export required crosscompile, previously we use prebuilt google-clang.

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export CC='/clang-toolchain/bin/clang'
export CLANG_TRIPLE=aarch64-linux-gnu-
export CLANG_TRIPLE_ARM32=arm-linux-gnueabi-
export CROSS_COMPILE='/clang-toolchain/bin/aarch64-linux-gnu-'
export CROSS_COMPILE_ARM32='/clang-toolchain/bin/arm-linux-gnueabi-'
export KBUILD_COMPILER_STRING="$('/clang-toolchain/bin/clang' --version | head -n 1 | perl -pe 's/\((?:http|git).*?\)//gs' | sed -e 's/  */ /g')"

  3. Make the device config and build the kernel, at this point we will build dipper kernel.

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make O=out ARCH=arm64 canting-dipper_defconfig
make -j$(nproc --all) O=out

Repack Kernel Image

At this point, we are going to repack the kernel image into flashable kernel.zip. There is a powerfull flashable.zip made by Chris Renshaw called AnyKernel. All of supported kernel are able to use those flashable.zip, just follow this guides:

1. Clone Canting-AnyKernel repository, for an example we use dipper branch

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git clone https://github.com/khusika/AnyKernel3 -b dipper canting-kernel-dipper

  2. Copy or move the kernel images into the AnyKernel directories

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cp '/canting/out/arch/arm64/boot/Image.gz-dtb' '/canting-kernel-dipper'

  3. Compress the kernel using zip

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zip -r9 kernel.zip * -x README.md kernel.zip

References

• Albe96, 2017. How To Build Android Kernel With Features.
• Android Open Source Project, 2020. Establishing a Build Environment.
• Nathanchance, 2017. How to compile an Android kernel.