5 ms·
Welcome to the wonderful world of ARM and driver blobs. Half of the waiting time is waiting for Qualcomm to release a blob (and that's if they even want to), th
by ohgodplsno 4y ago
Welcome to the wonderful world of ARM and driver blobs. Half of the waiting time is waiting for Qualcomm to release a blob (and that's if they even want to), the other half is including it in your build, and eventually making your fork's changes if you want to do so. For every single SoC in your lineup. Then testing if they can support the new requirements of Android.
Apple would have the same problem if iOS was open source and distributable by anyone, their chips being able to be made by anyone. Once again, Apple has picked the easiest (and least open) path, so, yeah, they can upgrade easily.
- NonNefarious 4y agoThanks for the info. Why can't the driver be abstracted enough to allow a new OS install as long as the ABI of the driver doesn't change? Major Windows versions installed over the same drivers for years. I've never written a hardware driver, so I'm left to guess or speculate.