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Google outlines plans for mainline Linux kernel support in Android
It seems like Google is working hard to update and upstream the Linux kernel that sits at the heart of every Android phone. The company was a big participant in this year's Linux Plumbers Conference, a yearly meeting of the top Linux developers, and Google spent a lot of time talking about getting Android to work with a generic Linux kernel instead of the highly customized version it uses now. It even showed an Android phone running a mainline Linux kernel.
But first, some background on Android's current kernel mess.Currently, three major forks happen in between the "mainline" Linux kernel and a shipping Android device (note that "mainline" here has no relation to Google's own "Project Mainline"). First, Google takes the LTS (Long Term Support) Linux kernel and turns it into the "Android Common kernel"—the Linux kernel with all the Android OS-specific patches applied. Android Common is shipped to the SoC vendor (usually Qualcomm) where it gets its first round of hardware-specific additions, first focusing on a particular model of SoC. This "SoC Kernel" then gets sent to a device manufacturer for even more hardware-specific code that supports every other piece of hardware, like the display, camera, speakers, usb ports, and any extra hardware. This is the "Device Kernel," and it's what actually ships on a device.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @05:34AM (6 children)
And those SoC patches from Qualcomm include closed binaries that are both chip model and kernel version specific with an utter rats-nest of patches to the kernel to make it as hard as possible to upgrade the device to a newer version of Android. Been there, done that, did not get the T-shirt or a working phone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @09:01AM (4 children)
MediaTek are even worse, Samsung CPUs were pretty bad a few years back -- not that it matters much now since they're shutting down their CPU division. I'm surprised nobody has sued these companies for breaching the GPL.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday November 21 2019, @09:22AM (3 children)
It's not really possible to sue for Linux GPL violations. Only the copyright holders can sue for copyright/license violations, so you'd have to get every single Linux contributor to participate in a lawsuit.
This is why the FSF asks all contributors to assign copyright to the FSF, so that it's actually feasible for the FSF to sue for GPL violations.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday November 21 2019, @02:54PM (1 child)
If Linux were to have copyright holders sign over rights, who would they go to?
Linus? Who pays him?
The Linux Foundation? They were acquired by Microsoft (as a platinum member) in 2016. Talk about handing the copyright directly to the wolf.
Other ideas?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @03:58PM
what about the other 27 platinum members?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @09:46PM
You don't need every contributor; you just need one to enforce their rights under copyright law. Even better for your claim if they wrote part of the code being patched by the derivative work, but I've seen some analysis that even that may not be necessary under a "multiple-edition edited-volume" theory.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Thursday November 21 2019, @09:32AM
That's absolutely true.
I still haven't gotten anything later than Nougat to even boot enough to debug via logcat for my HTC OneMax (t6vzw) [soylentnews.org].
And the issue is integrating the older HTC kernel/hardware blobs into newer versions of Android.
But why should you expect anything else? Making it easy to do would mean not having to buy a new phone every 26 minutes because android versions/features aren't supported by those proprietary kernels/hardware blobs.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr