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Phone manufacturers always buy the drivers from chip manufacturers, and under closed licenses. The source is rarely ever published, you can't download the kerne
by kuschku 9y ago
Phone manufacturers always buy the drivers from chip manufacturers, and under closed licenses. The source is rarely ever published, you can't download the kernel patches and do anything. Often you'll wait months or years to get the kernel the manufacturer used, and it will have been so old that none of the drivers will work on a recent linux kernel anymore at all.
The situation isn't exactly great. And torvalds believes it to be more important to talk nice to these companies than to enforce the GPL, so nothing's been moving in the past decade at all.
- piracykills 9y agoYeah, the only hope we've got is to move to a more Windows-style driver model, which is what Treble attempts to do, abstracting the HAL from the kernel and application software. This is already shipping in Android O and new devices on O or P must be Treble certified to ship Play Store, so we should see this improved greatly in upcoming devices.
- pjmlp 9y agoIf only OEMs weren't the ones expected to do Treble updates....
- piracykills 9y agoIf they are fully compatible it means community updates can work better too - not needing to worry about the HAL as much. Yes, Google might need to take one more step of saying "and we ship the security updates" before the average user benefits - but that can be done down the line if the situation merits it. Developers and power users will be able to take advantage of it even sooner. A single codebase for LineageOS? Yes please!
- pjmlp 9y agoCommunity updates don't count for regular users, nor does LinageOS.