Heimdall

Heimdall is a cross-platform open-source tool suite used to flash firmware (aka ROMs) onto Samsung mobile devices.

Supported Platforms

Heimdall should work on most Linux systems, and perhaps even on OSX and Windows, though the latter two are not tested by the current maintainer.

How does Heimdall work?

Heimdall connects to a mobile device over USB and interacts with low-level software running on the device, known as Loke. Loke and Heimdall communicate via the custom Samsung-developed protocol typically referred to as the 'Odin 3 protocol'.

USB communication in Heimdall is handled by the popular open-source USB library, libusb.

Free & Open Source

Heimdall is both free and open source. It is licensed under the MIT license (see LICENSE).

Heimdall has been developed through countless hours of reverse engineering work, predominantly by Glass Echidna, a tiny independent software development company.

Documentation

To compile Heimdall and Heimdall-frontend (the gui application), run something like:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make

To only compile the CLI tool, add the option -DDISABLE_FRONTEND=true to the cmake command.

The name of dependencies vary between distributions. On alpinelinux you need to install: make cmake gcc g++ libc-dev qt5-qtbase-dev and libusb-dev, on archlinux: cmake libusb qt5-base and on ubuntu: cmake g++ pkg-config libusb-1.0.0-dev qtbase5-dev and zlib1g-dev.

Some more documentation, and instructions on how to use Heimdall and Heimdall-frontend, can be found in the doc/ folder.

Odin protocol and PIT format