Greg Kroah-Hartman: Android and the Linux kernel community

Posted Feb 3, 2010 3:08 UTC (Wed) by fuhchee (guest, #40059)
Parent article: Greg Kroah-Hartman: Android and the Linux kernel community

"... Companies with Android-specific platform and drivers can not contribute upstream, which causes these companies a much larger maintenance and development cycle ..."

Have any of these companies supplied anecdotal or better evidence of this greater burden they undertook? What justifies the sense that they are interested in keeping up with upstream linux developments for their phones?

Greg Kroah-Hartman: Android and the Linux kernel community

Posted Feb 3, 2010 3:52 UTC (Wed) by gregkh (subscriber, #8) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes, a number of companies have approached the kernel development
community to try to get us to help solve this problem. It is causing them a lot
of grief, as I tried to explain.

You know things are bad when a hardware company comes and asks the
community for help :)

Greg Kroah-Hartman: Android and the Linux kernel community

Posted Feb 3, 2010 17:28 UTC (Wed) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link] (1 responses)

Hm, having read your blog article (and not the rest, in particular not any other details on the earlier discussions of API changes), and also having read Chris DB's comment further below, I have to say that Google perhaps has a point.

... with an investment as large as Google's in Android, they have to be allowed to make and retain their own design decisions, at least for their own use.

For example, the "Android userspace logic" would seem a difficult thing to legislate for anyone but Google, unless the necessary changes are minor. Likewise, if they find a new lock type necessary for their work, it would seem a tall order to have them take it out now (and deal with the resulting breakage on their users' phone ...)

So is there really no compromise possible in another way? (for example - only drivers needed for Android get to use the Android-specific infrastructure?) That at least would keep the overall code base closer to the mainline than with an outright fork ... and well, perhaps some day someone else actually finds that framebuffer infrastructure unexpectedly helpful after all?)

Greg Kroah-Hartman: Android and the Linux kernel community

Posted Feb 3, 2010 19:34 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

no, Google created some new core kernel infrastructure. For it to work (and for the drivers that depend on it to work) it needs to be implemented everywhere.

Kernel developers (including other embedded developers who have achieved good power savings modes) don't believe that the Android way of doing things is good.

Greg Kroah-Hartman: Android and the Linux kernel community

Posted Feb 3, 2010 3:52 UTC (Wed) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

If you would have read the fine article, Greg mentioned that he had gotten a number of questions from developers as a result of the removal of the Google code... and that a number of companies affected by the removal were already working on changing their code to get it into the mainline since Google has dropped the ball.