Google posts initial Device Trees for booting Pixel 10 hardware on mainline Linux

Google has quietly taken another step toward better Linux support on its hardware. A Chromium engineer has posted the first set of Device Tree (DT) files needed to boot the Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel 10 Pro XL on the mainline Linux kernel, marking the first signs of upstream bring-up for Google’s newest Tensor G5-powered devices.

While this move won’t benefit end-users anytime soon, it’s still notable progress for developers who track Google’s approach to Linux, especially following recent developments around the Android Linux Terminal, GPU acceleration, and Qualcomm’s ongoing absence from Android’s new Linux functionality.

Pixel 10 Device Trees land on LKML

The patches, published in an LKML thread dated November 11, introduce barebones DT files for the Pixel 10 family, internally referred to as “frankel” (Pixel 10), “blazer” (Pixel 10 Pro), and “mustang” (Pixel 10 Pro XL).

The DTs are extremely minimal. As the engineer explains:

“With a yet-unreleased bootloader these can boot to a UART command prompt from an initramfs.”

That means you can technically boot mainline Linux, but only to a serial console. No display stack, no drivers, no radio, no cameras, no Android; just a command prompt. It’s several steps away from a usable smartphone experience.

Still, these early contributions matter because Device Trees are foundational for upstream support. They declare the hardware layout, enabling the mainline kernel to interact with things like cores, clocks, buses, and basic subsystems.

The patches also kick off the usual LKML discussions around naming conventions, compatible strings, and directory organization, the unglamorous but necessary paperwork of kernel bring-up.

This development lands amid a flurry of Linux-related work happening across Android and, especially, Google’s Pixel ecosystem. Not long ago, Google added GPU acceleration for graphical Linux apps inside Android’s Terminal app. It uses Gfxstream, a graphics forwarding layer that pipes API calls from the guest Linux VM to the host Android GPU, promising near-native performance for GUI apps. However, the feature is Pixel 10-exclusive for now.

Expected in the December Pixel Feature Drop with Android 16 QPR2 stable update, Google is unlocking much broader shared-storage access for the Linux Terminal. Instead of being sandboxed to the Downloads folder, the Terminal VM will be able to access most of your phone’s shared user data in a major upgrade for anyone using Android’s built-in Linux environment for development or tooling.

Meanwhile, Qualcomm sticks out for the wrong reasons: the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 still does not support Android’s Linux Terminal at all. That makes Qualcomm the only major vendor missing support for one of Android 16’s headline features.

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