Reverse-engineered Doogee U10 (Rockchip RK3562) to boot full Debian 12 Bookworm from SD card, no bootloader unlock or internal storage changes required.
Key Takeaways
SD card boot leaves Android on eMMC untouched; remove card and stock Android resumes normally.
Fully reverse-engineered with no BSP or vendor docs; DTB extracted from stock firmware and rebuilt from scratch with Claude, Codex, and Gemini assistance.
Most hardware works: display, touchscreen, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, audio, battery, USB OTG, accelerometer, NPU; cameras partially functional pending ISP color calibration.
Build system (build.sh) produces a flashable xz-compressed image from a standard x86-64 Debian/Ubuntu host with debootstrap and qemu-user-static.
Hacker News Comment Review
The author confirms the full process: DTB from stock Android firmware, no vendor kernel source, rebuilt entirely from Firefly RK3562 open-source repos as a starting point.
Commenters note AI tooling (Claude, Codex, Gemini) made the reversal tractable for a device that would otherwise not justify the effort, signaling a shift in what solo hackers can economically reverse-engineer.
Notable Comments
@roger_: “I love how easy AI makes it to hack devices that otherwise wouldn’t be worth the time.”
