[Sailfish X] Can I flash Xperia Kernel 4.4 instead of 3.10? [answered]

@lakutalo:
Greetings and thanks for the warm welcome and the infos.
Just one more question: You say that I'd have to use the community edition of SFOS. So I take it that using a newer kernel with SailfishX (i.e. just flashing the 4.4 loire image) is not possible/won't work?
I would very much like to have Alien Dalvik available :)

As with every other distribution you need to recompile everything for a newer kernel. Alien Dalvik is not part of the community version, though. So I very much doubt it, to tell it the most positive way I can imagine right now, unless of course you can get the sources. :)

As with every other distribution you need to recompile everything for a newer kernel.

As a Gentoo user I can totally say that this is not true. Quite the opposite, at least mainline Linux kernel devs try not to break userland components with kernel changes.
What is true though is that all kernel modules need to be rebuild when updating the kernel. And AlienDalvik might be tied to a certain kernel version, too.

There is now kernel 4.9 available at Sony Developer site:

https://developer.sony.com/file/download/software-binaries-for-aosp-pie-android-9-0-kernel-4-9-loire-v1/

It would be very, very awesome if Jolla would update Sailfish X to run on top of that... It requires a metric ton of work, but perhaps community could do bulk of the work...

Oh, and to answer your actual question: I tried to flash SFOSX using kernel 4.4 image instead of the one listed in the install guide, and the result was a non-booting device. I just reflashed the correct image, and my device worked again - and still works :)