Bringing Android closer to the mainline [LWN.net]

Bringing Android closer to the mainline

Posted Dec 21, 2011 9:30 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670)
Parent article: Bringing Android closer to the mainline

Is it out of the question for Android to transition some kernel interfaces to more generic ones in the future? Most programs end users care about are written either for Dalvik or using NDK and shouldn't care much about wakelocks or logging for example.

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Bringing Android closer to the mainline

Posted Dec 21, 2011 18:11 UTC (Wed) by tbird20d (subscriber, #1901) [Link]

See the mailing list for some discussion of this. In general, it is conceivable to transition to more generic interfaces. However, for each one you have to evaluate what the impact is to existing code throughout user space. For example, most programs doing logging are not directly making Linux system calls, and there is likely some flexibility there to change the interface if needed. The question, IMHO, is how much change is really needed.

Bringing Android closer to the mainline

Posted Dec 22, 2011 4:32 UTC (Thu) by swetland (subscriber, #63414) [Link]

Nope. And we have made changes like that in the past, often as kernel subsystems evolve to provide functionality we'd previously implemented in an ad-hoc manner.

We're not interested in completely gutting and rebuilding the Android userspace, no matter how many times people suggest "oh you would just rewrite x, y, and z and then it would do something almost like w".

We have existing, proven, working code that's been in the field for four plus years and gets the job done. Not breaking the existing system is important. A lot of the proposed "oh just replace x with y" where y is something not-really-the-same or something reimplemented-as-a-userspace-daemon would require quite a lot of work to validate and hunt down regressions. Work that is hard to justify given everything else we need to do to keep moving the platform forward.

That said, working towards unified interfaces and the ability to run Android on "out of the box" mainline kernels is definitely a goal we're interested in.