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Looking at the stats, it's interesting the Google are so low (1.4% of changesets) when they do so much work on both Android and Chrome OS. Does their work not g
by dave1010uk 15y ago
Looking at the stats, it's interesting the Google are so low (1.4% of changesets) when they do so much work on both Android and Chrome OS. Does their work not go upstream?
It's also interesting that Nokia are at 1.8% of changesets when Elop siad they weren't producing any more MeeGo phones.
Is most work that goes into Linux now just adding drivers for new hardware? Or are there ineresting new kernel features that people are working on?
- rythie 15y agoFrom what I recall something like 50% of the code is for device drivers, though there is interesting stuff going elsewhere. LWN covers it pretty well (in fact nowhere else really does at all) http://lwn.net/Kernel/ http://lwn.net/Kernel/ Also, those stats don't take into how used something is. You can dump 200k lines for a device only used by 0.1% of users, yet if you wrote something of 2k lines, used by every user (scheduling/filesystem etc.) you wouldn't make the table, even though your impact is greater.
- rythie 15y ago48.8% by size in the drivers directory: linux-3.0-rc7$ du -sc * |sort -nr |head -2 505508 total 246524 drivers
- duskwuff 15y ago> Does [Google's] work not go upstream? A lot of it doesn't, actually. Many of the Android patches are pretty intrusive, and wouldn't necessarily be suitable for integration into the mainline kernel -- for instance, the Android permissions model depends on a bunch of these kernel patches.
- rlpb 15y agoI'm pretty sure that they'd ultimately accept kernel patches for the actual end-to-end functionality that Android needs, but there would be a lot of debate and probably considerable engineering changes to kernel interfaces needed first. In practice, Android development seems to be more focused on shipping rather than on code quality, accruing technical debt in the process. To be fair to them, it's a project that is really an entire Linux distribution, requires lots of components written from scratch and not used anywhere else, and they're under massive pressure to keep up with the competition.
- dave1010uk 15y agoIt seems a shame than Android is so different from standard Linux distributions and doesn't really use any of the normal Linux stack. It would be really cool if Android was more "Linux" than just the kernel (like Web OS & MeeGo are).