Some clarification on "the Android Kernel"

Posted Feb 8, 2010 6:04 UTC (Mon) by swetland (guest, #63414)
In reply to: Some clarification on "the Android Kernel" by rahulsundaram
Parent article: Greg Kroah-Hartman: Android and the Linux kernel community

Shipping great products will *always* be higher priority than getting full buy-in from upstream or getting all patches reviewed. There's no way we can tie our ship schedules to an external process like that and accomplish the hard deadlines involved in shipping successful consumer electronics / mobile devices. Realistically, we'll always ship based on at least a couple-month-old kernel due to the time involved in QA, regulatory testing, and qualification for these kinds of devices.

That said, keeping up to date with mainline is extremely important to us -- thus we've rebased many times between 2.6.14 (first internal kernel work) and 2.6.32 (latest), to track mainline, as opposed to sitting on some years-old release forever.

And the best way to keep up to date is just to be in the mainline kernel, so we want to get there and will work to get there, as we can, around other schedule, staffing, etc limitations that often make it difficult.

Some clarification on "the Android Kernel"

Posted Feb 18, 2011 6:00 UTC (Fri) by tchalvak (guest, #72984) [Link]

Thank you for explaining the necessity of your approach. With a goal like android phones in mind, I expect it is certainly necessary to make some compromises, it's just a question of how short the turn-around time can be to compensate for compromises.

I felt compelled to create an account to comment on the unfortunate level of hostility and lack of willingness to start useful, civil dialog ppreviously shown in this thread.

Android (from a user perspective) is a breath of fresh air in the operating system ecosystem, and I eagerly await the day that it becomes integrated more fully with desktop linux, so that everyone gets the benefit of both. I expect willingness to work together on what may be difficult technical solutions is the only thing that will get us there.

--posted via my android phone