Heimdall is a cross-platform open-source tool suite used to flash firmware (aka ROMs) onto Samsung mobile devices.
Officially, AMD64/x86-64 (64-bit) or x86 (32-bit) computers running:
- Linux
- macOS
- Windows (XP, Vista, 7 etc.)
However, several third-parties have reported success running Heimdall on ARM chipsets (in particular Raspberry Pi), as well as additional operating systems such as FreeBSD.
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.
Heimdall is both free and open source. It is licensed under the MIT license (see LICENSE).
Heimdall is maintained and predominantly developed by Glass Echidna, a tiny independent software development company. If you appreciate our work and would like to support future development please consider making a donation.
For more details about how to compile and install Heimdall please refer to the appropriate platform specific README:
- Linux/README (online)
- OSX/README.txt (online)
- Win32/README.txt (online)