[mschuster91]

If you're in for a wild ride, you could try to take some reasonably current Android phone and get enough of the manufacturer's changes to the Linux kernel upstream to run generic Linux on it.

There are a lot of patches that are purely Android-specific and won't ever make it to upstream Linux, but others, like the drivers for flash chips and USB? These could definitely be submitted upstream.

Samsung for example uploads their FOSS dumps to [1].

First thing I'd do is to get u-boot working as a fourth-stage bootloader so you don't have to wrestle with ODIN or fastboot every time you rebuild your kernel. That alone should be a decent sized university project.

[1] https://opensource.samsung.com/uploadList?menuItem=mobile&cl...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting_process_of_Android_dev...

[seb1204]

Anything that supports the Android ROM scene and that makes their life easier sounds fantastic in my opinion. Please have a go here.

[jeroenhd]

This would greatly help projects like postmarketOS. Plenty of old devices that have already been partially ported to pick from: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

Having an existing community may also be useful for figuring this stuff out.