After literally months of leaks and pushbacks (with most of those pushbacks caused by the ongoing pandemic), the Pixel 4a finally became a reality some weeks ago. After Google's success with the Pixel 3a lineup—which brought average mid-range specifications and paired them with the very same camera prowess you'll find on high-end Pixel smartphones and the same excellent software goodies and support—Google wanted to do it again, and so they did. The Pixel 4a an updated design with a front-facing hole-punch camera, a Snapdragon 730 processor, and, of course, possibly the very best camera in its price segment. Oh, and it's also very easy to mod these phones, in case you forgot. So guess what? We now have both a custom ROM and custom kernel for the Pixel 4a.
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You might say that, since the phone runs stock, honest-to-Google Android, there's really no need for custom ROMs. But this is Resurrection Remix: it cherry-picks features and changes from several custom ROM projects. It's still based on stock Android (AOSP), but it also manages to provide serious customization capabilities as well as features you won't find on the phone's stock software (Google's Android).
Resurrection Remix v8 for the Pixel 4a
We also have the HolyDragon Kernel, a custom kernel project based on Google's source code. It's compiled using Google Clang 11.0.1 at the time of writing, it's already preconfigured with the most optimal settings (so you don't need any tweaking after flashing—it's ready out-of-the-box), and it comes with a lot of features, most of them geared towards stability and performance. You have features such as KCAL support, Boeffla Wakelock Blocker, NTFS RW support, exFAT support, and more. According to the developer, it's still a "work-in-progress" in terms of features, but the kernel itself is marked as stable. Oh, and it also comes pre-installed on the Resurrection Remix builds I mentioned earlier, so if you're flashing that to your device, there's no need to download the kernel separately.