Bringing Android closer to the mainline [LWN.net]

Bringing Android closer to the mainline

Posted Dec 24, 2011 21:22 UTC (Sat) by augustz (guest, #37348)
Parent article: Bringing Android closer to the mainline

I thought Arve Hjønnevåg tried to upstream wakelocks something like three years ago?

http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/linux-pm/2009...

If I remember it didn't go well (horribly).

Google seems to have managed the engineering on these interfaces such that they have shipped 200+ million units. They are not the only one trying to base a phone platform on linux, but do seem to have made the necessary trade-offs to actually ship product.

The time to ship pressure in the embedded space does seem to lend itself to more hacky results than mainline. I'm looking forward to seeing the convergence :) Also, as the pool of embedded folks in the mainline space grows, the feedback to new contributors from embedded may improve.

Good luck to everyone!

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Bringing Android closer to the mainline

Posted Dec 24, 2011 21:44 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Eh. I don't entirely buy that - most of Nokia's work (now obviously less relevant than it was) is pretty well aligned with upstream, and despite the change in course I think it's hard to argue that they failed to ship product.

The main reason (from my perspective) that Android is more attractive here is that it moves a lot of the responsibility away from app programmers - they can ignore a bunch of power saving and the OS looks after them. The upside of that is that it's much harder for a poorly written application to interfere with your battery life - the downside is that it makes it much easer to have a higher idle (but not asleep) power consumption. But making compromises that favour app developers results in a larger number of applications, and that makes it a more attractive platform for everyone.

Android may actually be one of the first good examples of Worse is Better in the Linux kernel sphere. The MIT people thought UNIX's signal handling code was awful. The Linux people (mostly) think wakelocks are awful. No matter how much we may dislike it on a technical front, I think the wakelock approach is sufficiently simple that it's going to outcompete other solutions.