forking vendors [LWN.net]

forking vendors

Posted Jun 7, 2011 8:46 UTC (Tue) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463)
Parent article: Android, forking, and control

The really bad problem with android is IMHO not one google produces directly (maybe indirectly by not working with the mainstream-kernel; but certainly not willingly): It's phone-vendors patching drivers (and the rest of the system with it) and not merging them upstream.

Now you get hundreds of phones which have no recent android-distribution on them. Right now, the only hope for those affected are things like Cyanogen-mod (A big "thank you" to them, by the way), which in effect provides a community-distribution for certain android-phones.

Forking the kernel (and making their own distribution) actually puts google into the place of responsibility. Things the kernel-community would have done have to be done by google now. And I think google should step up, get all those driver-patches from all the device-manufacturers involved and make an android-distribution which runs on _all_ phones.

The minimum I would expect is for google to provide a kernel (and its sources, in a form which can be compiled with minimum fuss -- with "make menuconfig; make", just as the mainline kernel) which would run on all the devices.

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forking vendors

Posted Jun 7, 2011 13:13 UTC (Tue) by Aissen (subscriber, #59976) [Link]

I'm afraid Android isn't going to in have generic "distribution" kernels anytime soon. It's so much easier to just do one-shot kernel for every device :-(
https://twitter.com/#!/jbqueru/status/67223151683174400
https://twitter.com/#!/jbqueru/status/67223447264169985

This relates to this weeks "Forking ARM" article by Thomas Gleixner, but is actually yet another different problem plaguing the ARM platform. No hardware discoverability, and no standard BIOS+ACPI thingy(thank god) to bring uniformity. The kernel developers have been working on a solution and came up with device trees, although those might one day be part of the problem (just like BIOSes, ACPI and EFI).

forking vendors

Posted Jun 7, 2011 16:52 UTC (Tue) by swetland (subscriber, #63414) [Link]

Well, all credit due to JBQ who works his butt off, but from the system/kernel team's perspective, we'd *love* to get closer to mainline and have things more standardized. It's certainly not easy.