A tempest in a toybox [LWN.net]

A tempest in a toybox

Posted Feb 4, 2012 18:33 UTC (Sat) by alankila (guest, #47141)
In reply to: A tempest in a toybox by cas
Parent article: A tempest in a toybox

I can't help feeling that attributing CM's existence to GPL is somewhat incorrect, given that such a large part of Android is not GPL to begin with.

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A tempest in a toybox

Posted Feb 4, 2012 18:41 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (2 responses)

The GPL is the only reason the vendors have to give up the kernel, and without that you'd only have CM for the Nexuses.

A tempest in a toybox

Posted Feb 5, 2012 3:32 UTC (Sun) by Fowl (subscriber, #65667) [Link] (1 responses)

CM could still run with extracted binary vendor kernels, same as it uses extracted binary userspace libraries now. Things like the cameras on many of these devices have kernel shims and then user space blobs providing the abi that (a particular version of) android expects. Much effort is expended reverse engineering and writing wrappers for these kinds of things.

Without kernel source it would 'just' be harder and certain features wouldn't be possible. Look at what the Widows Mobile modding community achieved with no source, for anything.

A tempest in a toybox

Posted Feb 5, 2012 3:41 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Newer versions of Android depend on functionality present in newer kernels. While it's theoretically possible that people could shim that into 2 year old kernel binaries, in practical terms most CM ports simply wouldn't exist.