6 ms·

I was bit confused why this was notable, but the Pixel 9a just released Thursday. So this is an incredibly fast turnaround for a community OS.

bitpush 1y ago
They are starting from an OS that is made to work on these devices.
- nzeid 1y ago
  ? As in the OS in question is GrapheneOS itself?
  - nofriend 1y ago
    i assume referring to aosp
    - nzeid 1y ago
      Right, and that would actually be a mountain and a monumental achievement. But one could argue that the team can move fast on 9a because they can piggyback existing (GrapheneOS) distros.
- strcat 1y ago
  All Android devices support running the Android Open Source Project via Treble and we could quickly add support for non-Pixel devices doing things in a reasonable way too. Those devices don't meet our hardware security requirements (https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices) which is why we don't support them. It wouldn't be that hard to add a Sony or Motorola device but they're missing the expected security features and proper updates. It wouldn't be possible to provide our standard security protections on them which is the real blocking issue, not difficulty. Android has made device support simple, but the rest of the Android device ecosystem is not at all competitive in security with Pixels and iPhones. We automate a huge portion of the work via https://github.com/GrapheneOS/adevtool https://github.com/GrapheneOS/adevtool. We do a GrapheneOS build with it and it outputs state you can see in https://github.com/GrapheneOS/vendor_state https://github.com/GrapheneOS/vendor_state which is then used to automatically figure out all of the missing overlays, SELinux policy, firmware files, etc. When we have our own devices in partnership with an OEM we won't need to use adevtool. We can borrow a lot from Pixels for those devices though. Pixels are very similar to each other, which does make things simpler. The entire kernel source tree is identical for 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th generation Pixels. They all use the Linux 6.1 long term support branch on bare metal and the Linux 6.6 branch for on-device virtual machines. They'll likely advance to new Linux kernel branches together rather than ending up very split across different ones as they were in the past. That makes things easier for us. Pixels also share most of the same drivers for the SoC and lots of other drivers. Those drivers support the different generations of hardware with the same codebase for the most part. There are still 6 different Wi-Fi/Bluetooth drivers across them but 5 of those are variations of a very similar Broadcom Wi-Fi/Bluetooth driver and only 1 is a separate Qualcomm Atheros driver (Pixel 7a). We have various hardware-based hardening features such as our hardware-based disabling of the USB-C port with variations across different hardware generations (https://grapheneos.org/features#usb-c-port-and-pogo-pins-control https://grapheneos.org/features#usb-c-port-and-pogo-pins-con...) and similar features. Our exploit protection features also uncover lots of memory corruption bugs across devices in their drivers. We do have a lot of device-specific work fixing uncovered bugs. Hardware memory tagging in particular finds nearly every heap memory corruption bug occurring during regular use including out-of-bound reads so that finds a lot of bugs we need to handle. Many of the bugs we find with hardware memory tagging and other memory corruption exploit protections are in drivers or the portable Bluetooth software stack which is thankfully one of the components Android is currently gradually rewriting in Rust along with the media stack. If we supported a device with much different drivers, there wouldn't be much work to deal with that directly but enabling our features like our hardware memory tagging support would require fixing a bunch of memory corruption bugs occurring during regular use across it. Supporting other Android devices with the Android Open Source Project is easy. Supporting them with GrapheneOS is significantly harder due to various hardening features needing integration at a low level along with others uncovering a lot of latent bugs which were occurring but not being noticed most of the time. The ones which get noticed often due to breaking things get fixed, but many latent memory corruption bugs remain there unless the OEM heavily tests with HWASan or MTE themselves, which is unlikely. Pixels are tested with HWASan and MTE by Google but yet we still have to fix a lot ourselves largely because testing them in a device farm is different than users actually using them with assorted Bluetooth accessories, etc.
  - haukem 1y ago
    Thank you for all the insights. Nice to know that all supported Pixel phones are not only on the same kernel version, but actually are build fro the same source tree now. Do you also contribute your fixes back to the upstream projects like the upstream Linux kernel, AOSP or Google? Many of the security features you are using are already included in AOSP, why does Google not activate them by default? Do they have a different balancing of performance, stability and compatibility on the one side and security on the other? I understand that Google has a different view on privacy for business reasons.
    - strcat 1y ago
      > Do you also contribute your fixes back to the upstream projects like the upstream Linux kernel, AOSP or Google? We've made significant contributions to the Linux kernel, AOSP and Pixels in the past. We continue doing it to the extent that it helps GrapheneOS users. We no longer spend our time doing work for them if it doesn't have a clear benefit to our users. Android's security team previously got us security partner access and was in the process of getting us OEM partner access. Android's partner management team blocked us from getting OEM partner access and revoked our security partner access. Due to this, we've reduced our reports of vulnerabilities upstream and have fixed numerous vulnerabilities in GrapheneOS without reporting them. We still report all firmware and hardware vulnerabilities but we make a decision about reporting software vulnerabilities solely based on what's best for GrapheneOS users. > Many of the security features you are using are already included in AOSP That's not really the case. The vast majority of our privacy and security features were developed for GrapheneOS. Features being built on top of standard functionality doesn't mean that they're present in AOSP. For example, GrapheneOS has our own integration of hardware memory tagging into our hardened_malloc project and we turned the overall feature into something which can be used in production without making the OS unusable. We had to fix issues with the standard hardware memory tagging integration in the OS and Vanadium (Chromium) along with fixing numerous bugs uncovered by it. We had to integrate it into our user-facing crash reporting system and had to create a system for opting into using it for user installed apps where users can enable it for either specific user installed apps or for all user installed apps with a per-app opt-out. Android has the foundation for hardware memory tagging support but it's not used as a production feature for hardening and we're not simply enabling it. We have a much better userspace implementation in hardened_malloc and while we currently use the standard kernel allocator integration, we want to improve that to be closer to what we do with it in hardened_malloc. We currently use the standard Linux kernel MTE integration for the kernel allocators and the standard Chromium PartitionAlloc MTE integration but both need to be improved to provide better security properties as hardened_malloc does. They're also missing the other forms of hardening used by hardened_malloc which go nicely with memory tagging. The stock OS developer option for memory tagging is not the same thing and only makes it available for usage without actually using it. It has to then be enabled via ADB but there's no way to use it everywhere we do or in the same way we do. AOSP having that doesn't mean it provides what we do with it at all. > Do they have a different balancing of performance, stability and compatibility on the one side and security on the other? Yes, but you're wrong about where our privacy and security features come from.
- crossroadsguy 1y ago
  Reminds me of iOS and iDevices and how even after months they keep stabilising and then they fail to stabilise and then they release the next version after a year with all those bugs intact and accumulated. In this case that OS is literally made for only those devices and vice-versa, in iron claw control of one control freak corporation that has a net worth more than GDPs many countries would nuke for. Let’s contrast that with a pure community led effort, motivated by freedom, privacy, and safety, that neither controls the OS nor the devices. It’s not what I tried to saltily explain above. Respectfully, I hope that sunk in.
CartwheelLinux 1y ago
Incredibly fast. While the 9a and 9 pro are very similar, for comunity based development this is substantial. I am often very critial, but I must give props to the grapeneos team.
tripdout 1y ago
I think a lot of the work is in new device bringup, and given that they can start from official Pixel trees, it shouldn't be too much work to adapt them for whatever GrapheneOS-specific build processes they have, and then I'm assuming the rest of the GrapheneOS customizations are framework side which should be device agnostic. I guess they could have kernel changes for hardening, but not sure how easy or hard porting those would be - is the Pixel 9 series on a newer kernel version than say the Pixel 8?
- strcat 1y ago
  GrapheneOS has various features requiring hardware integration. Our hardening features also uncover bugs across the code especially in drivers, especially the hardware memory tagging integration in our hardened_malloc project and the standard Linux kernel hardware memory tagging support we use in the kernel. Pixels are very similar to each other though so this work is largely but not entirely done for them. Adding new Pixels including whole new generations tends to be quite easy. When we still supported Snapdragon Pixels in the official GrapheneOS branch, it would have been fairly easy to add support for a theoretical Sony or Motorola device meeting our security requirements (https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices). Now that we don't have a Snapdragon device, we'd need to deal with fixing or working around all the bugs uncovered in Snapdragon drivers, integrating support for the USB-C controller into our USB-C port control feature (https://grapheneos.org/features#usb-c-port-and-pogo-pins-control https://grapheneos.org/features#usb-c-port-and-pogo-pins-con...), adding back our code for coercing Qualcomm XTRA into being privacy respecting, etc. Snapdragon doesn't have memory tagging yet like Tensor (and recent flagship Exynos/MediaTek now), but pretending it did, we'd need to solve a lot of issues uncovered by it unless Qualcomm and the device OEM heavily tested with it. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43669913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43669913 for more info including about kernels. 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th generation Pixels share the same Linux 6.1 source tree and kernel drivers since Android 15 QPR2 in March 2025. Pixel 9a is still using a branch of Android 15 QPR1 due to how device launches work so most of the work involved taking our last Android 15 QPR1 release from early March and rebasing it onto the Pixel 9a device branch tag where they forked off from an earlier Android 15 QPR1 release and backported current security patches to it. We then had to backport our changes since early March. The device branch will go away in a couple months and it will be on the same branch as everything else until it's end-of-life as usual. We could spend more time to integrate it into our main Android 15 QPR2 based branch ourselves but we can also simply wait a couple months. As an earlier example, the Pixel 8a was released in May 2024 based on Android 14 QPR1 rather than the current Android 14 QPR2. It was incorporated into mainline Android 14 QPR3 in June only a few weeks later. We know Android 16 is already going to deal with this so spending our time on this instead of implementing new privacy, security, usability and compatibility improvements would be a waste.
mixmastamyk 1y ago
Anyone know why drivers in this OS can't be ported to Linux, so it could support newer phones as well?
- strcat 1y ago
  Android Open Source Project and operating systems based on it like GrapheneOS are Linux distributions. The kernel drivers are Linux kernel drivers. The userspace drivers are part of Android's Treble hardware abstraction layer providing forwards compatibility with future Android releases and SELinux-based sandboxing with the drivers split up into isolated processes. Most of the driver complexity is in userspace with most kernel drivers acting as shims between the isolated drivers and the hardware. It's done that way for practical reasons on Android but it's good for security. Treble's compatibility system isn't very relevant to us right now. There's a new Android release every month: a monthly, quarterly or yearly release. The devices we currently support (Pixels) receive each of these updates officially. Most Android devices do not get the monthly or quarterly updates, only the yearly ones. Other devices rely on partial backports of security patches (Android Security Bulletins) to an initial release, which are provided for ~3-4 years after the initial yearly release. If we supported typical Android devices with that situation, then we'd at least partially rely on Treble to provide the latest OS version. Pixels are currently the only devices meeting our hardware security requirements listed at https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices. Having proper updates for 7 years from launch is just part of that, most of the requirements are for hardware-based security features like the secure element features, hardware memory tagging, pointer authentication, USB controller support for blocking new connections and disabling USB data, etc. GrapheneOS uses the 6.1 and 6.6 long term support branches of the Linux kernel with 6.12 as the next one that's likely going to be used to replace 6.6 for on-device virtual machines and the emulator with Android 16.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    > The kernel drivers are Linux kernel drivers. But they're drivers that are not upstreamed and which therefore make it hard to move to a newer kernel, right?
kowabungalow 1y ago
Also, this is the first pixel after this announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43485950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43485950
- codethief 1y ago
  Oh wow, how did I miss that! If strcat / Daniel Micay happens to pass by: How much will this impact future development of GrapheneO?
  - strcat 1y ago
    The changes are overstated in the media and has little impact on it. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43674145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43674145. We would benefit a lot from early access to quarterly and yearly releases but that hasn't ever been public and the AOSP main branch only provided the most recent changes for a few components, and not any of the ones we actually need most.
    - codethief 1y ago
      Thanks!
- strcat 1y ago
  The changes are overstated and it really changes very little for GrapheneOS. See https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/21315-explanation-of-recent-changes-to-aosp-and-the-lack-of-major-impact-on-grapheneos https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/21315-explanation-of-recent.... Android already published the full source code for Stable releases but barely anything for Beta releases. They didn't publish anything for upcoming releases with support for new devices. AOSP main branch received most changes through the Stable releases being merged into it. Most components were developed internally. Certain components were developed publicly in AOSP so they had to repeatedly merge back and forth between the internal and public main branches. GrapheneOS would benefit from having early access to the monthly, quarterly and yearly releases as Android OEM partners do. The only benefit of having access to the main development branch would be the ability to backport more fixes than they do along with doing it earlier. We occasionally backported fixes from AOSP main for the few components developed publicly through it, which is what's going to be mostly going away. It was a big help to us as access to the upcoming quarterly and yearly releases would be. Monthly updates are too small for it to really matter but it'd still help. Also worth noting the monthly security patch backports (Android Security Bulletins) are a separate thing from the new OS release each month. Those are backports of many of the High and Critical severity patches to older Android versions, often a month or two after they were released in the actual OS releases each month which are the monthly, quarterly and yearly releases (it's one of the 3 each month, with 3 quarterly releases and 1 yearly release per year although Android 16 is coming earlier this year instead of a 3rd quarterly release).

bitpush 1y ago

They are starting from an OS that is made to work on these devices.

nzeid 1y ago
? As in the OS in question is GrapheneOS itself?
- nofriend 1y ago
  i assume referring to aosp
  - nzeid 1y ago
    Right, and that would actually be a mountain and a monumental achievement. But one could argue that the team can move fast on 9a because they can piggyback existing (GrapheneOS) distros.
strcat 1y ago
All Android devices support running the Android Open Source Project via Treble and we could quickly add support for non-Pixel devices doing things in a reasonable way too. Those devices don't meet our hardware security requirements (https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices) which is why we don't support them. It wouldn't be that hard to add a Sony or Motorola device but they're missing the expected security features and proper updates. It wouldn't be possible to provide our standard security protections on them which is the real blocking issue, not difficulty. Android has made device support simple, but the rest of the Android device ecosystem is not at all competitive in security with Pixels and iPhones. We automate a huge portion of the work via https://github.com/GrapheneOS/adevtool https://github.com/GrapheneOS/adevtool. We do a GrapheneOS build with it and it outputs state you can see in https://github.com/GrapheneOS/vendor_state https://github.com/GrapheneOS/vendor_state which is then used to automatically figure out all of the missing overlays, SELinux policy, firmware files, etc. When we have our own devices in partnership with an OEM we won't need to use adevtool. We can borrow a lot from Pixels for those devices though. Pixels are very similar to each other, which does make things simpler. The entire kernel source tree is identical for 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th generation Pixels. They all use the Linux 6.1 long term support branch on bare metal and the Linux 6.6 branch for on-device virtual machines. They'll likely advance to new Linux kernel branches together rather than ending up very split across different ones as they were in the past. That makes things easier for us. Pixels also share most of the same drivers for the SoC and lots of other drivers. Those drivers support the different generations of hardware with the same codebase for the most part. There are still 6 different Wi-Fi/Bluetooth drivers across them but 5 of those are variations of a very similar Broadcom Wi-Fi/Bluetooth driver and only 1 is a separate Qualcomm Atheros driver (Pixel 7a). We have various hardware-based hardening features such as our hardware-based disabling of the USB-C port with variations across different hardware generations (https://grapheneos.org/features#usb-c-port-and-pogo-pins-control https://grapheneos.org/features#usb-c-port-and-pogo-pins-con...) and similar features. Our exploit protection features also uncover lots of memory corruption bugs across devices in their drivers. We do have a lot of device-specific work fixing uncovered bugs. Hardware memory tagging in particular finds nearly every heap memory corruption bug occurring during regular use including out-of-bound reads so that finds a lot of bugs we need to handle. Many of the bugs we find with hardware memory tagging and other memory corruption exploit protections are in drivers or the portable Bluetooth software stack which is thankfully one of the components Android is currently gradually rewriting in Rust along with the media stack. If we supported a device with much different drivers, there wouldn't be much work to deal with that directly but enabling our features like our hardware memory tagging support would require fixing a bunch of memory corruption bugs occurring during regular use across it. Supporting other Android devices with the Android Open Source Project is easy. Supporting them with GrapheneOS is significantly harder due to various hardening features needing integration at a low level along with others uncovering a lot of latent bugs which were occurring but not being noticed most of the time. The ones which get noticed often due to breaking things get fixed, but many latent memory corruption bugs remain there unless the OEM heavily tests with HWASan or MTE themselves, which is unlikely. Pixels are tested with HWASan and MTE by Google but yet we still have to fix a lot ourselves largely because testing them in a device farm is different than users actually using them with assorted Bluetooth accessories, etc.
- haukem 1y ago
  Thank you for all the insights. Nice to know that all supported Pixel phones are not only on the same kernel version, but actually are build fro the same source tree now. Do you also contribute your fixes back to the upstream projects like the upstream Linux kernel, AOSP or Google? Many of the security features you are using are already included in AOSP, why does Google not activate them by default? Do they have a different balancing of performance, stability and compatibility on the one side and security on the other? I understand that Google has a different view on privacy for business reasons.
  - strcat 1y ago
    > Do you also contribute your fixes back to the upstream projects like the upstream Linux kernel, AOSP or Google? We've made significant contributions to the Linux kernel, AOSP and Pixels in the past. We continue doing it to the extent that it helps GrapheneOS users. We no longer spend our time doing work for them if it doesn't have a clear benefit to our users. Android's security team previously got us security partner access and was in the process of getting us OEM partner access. Android's partner management team blocked us from getting OEM partner access and revoked our security partner access. Due to this, we've reduced our reports of vulnerabilities upstream and have fixed numerous vulnerabilities in GrapheneOS without reporting them. We still report all firmware and hardware vulnerabilities but we make a decision about reporting software vulnerabilities solely based on what's best for GrapheneOS users. > Many of the security features you are using are already included in AOSP That's not really the case. The vast majority of our privacy and security features were developed for GrapheneOS. Features being built on top of standard functionality doesn't mean that they're present in AOSP. For example, GrapheneOS has our own integration of hardware memory tagging into our hardened_malloc project and we turned the overall feature into something which can be used in production without making the OS unusable. We had to fix issues with the standard hardware memory tagging integration in the OS and Vanadium (Chromium) along with fixing numerous bugs uncovered by it. We had to integrate it into our user-facing crash reporting system and had to create a system for opting into using it for user installed apps where users can enable it for either specific user installed apps or for all user installed apps with a per-app opt-out. Android has the foundation for hardware memory tagging support but it's not used as a production feature for hardening and we're not simply enabling it. We have a much better userspace implementation in hardened_malloc and while we currently use the standard kernel allocator integration, we want to improve that to be closer to what we do with it in hardened_malloc. We currently use the standard Linux kernel MTE integration for the kernel allocators and the standard Chromium PartitionAlloc MTE integration but both need to be improved to provide better security properties as hardened_malloc does. They're also missing the other forms of hardening used by hardened_malloc which go nicely with memory tagging. The stock OS developer option for memory tagging is not the same thing and only makes it available for usage without actually using it. It has to then be enabled via ADB but there's no way to use it everywhere we do or in the same way we do. AOSP having that doesn't mean it provides what we do with it at all. > Do they have a different balancing of performance, stability and compatibility on the one side and security on the other? Yes, but you're wrong about where our privacy and security features come from.
crossroadsguy 1y ago
Reminds me of iOS and iDevices and how even after months they keep stabilising and then they fail to stabilise and then they release the next version after a year with all those bugs intact and accumulated. In this case that OS is literally made for only those devices and vice-versa, in iron claw control of one control freak corporation that has a net worth more than GDPs many countries would nuke for. Let’s contrast that with a pure community led effort, motivated by freedom, privacy, and safety, that neither controls the OS nor the devices. It’s not what I tried to saltily explain above. Respectfully, I hope that sunk in.

CartwheelLinux 1y ago

Incredibly fast. While the 9a and 9 pro are very similar, for comunity based development this is substantial. I am often very critial, but I must give props to the grapeneos team.

tripdout 1y ago

I think a lot of the work is in new device bringup, and given that they can start from official Pixel trees, it shouldn't be too much work to adapt them for whatever GrapheneOS-specific build processes they have, and then I'm assuming the rest of the GrapheneOS customizations are framework side which should be device agnostic. I guess they could have kernel changes for hardening, but not sure how easy or hard porting those would be - is the Pixel 9 series on a newer kernel version than say the Pixel 8?

strcat 1y ago
GrapheneOS has various features requiring hardware integration. Our hardening features also uncover bugs across the code especially in drivers, especially the hardware memory tagging integration in our hardened_malloc project and the standard Linux kernel hardware memory tagging support we use in the kernel. Pixels are very similar to each other though so this work is largely but not entirely done for them. Adding new Pixels including whole new generations tends to be quite easy. When we still supported Snapdragon Pixels in the official GrapheneOS branch, it would have been fairly easy to add support for a theoretical Sony or Motorola device meeting our security requirements (https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices). Now that we don't have a Snapdragon device, we'd need to deal with fixing or working around all the bugs uncovered in Snapdragon drivers, integrating support for the USB-C controller into our USB-C port control feature (https://grapheneos.org/features#usb-c-port-and-pogo-pins-control https://grapheneos.org/features#usb-c-port-and-pogo-pins-con...), adding back our code for coercing Qualcomm XTRA into being privacy respecting, etc. Snapdragon doesn't have memory tagging yet like Tensor (and recent flagship Exynos/MediaTek now), but pretending it did, we'd need to solve a lot of issues uncovered by it unless Qualcomm and the device OEM heavily tested with it. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43669913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43669913 for more info including about kernels. 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th generation Pixels share the same Linux 6.1 source tree and kernel drivers since Android 15 QPR2 in March 2025. Pixel 9a is still using a branch of Android 15 QPR1 due to how device launches work so most of the work involved taking our last Android 15 QPR1 release from early March and rebasing it onto the Pixel 9a device branch tag where they forked off from an earlier Android 15 QPR1 release and backported current security patches to it. We then had to backport our changes since early March. The device branch will go away in a couple months and it will be on the same branch as everything else until it's end-of-life as usual. We could spend more time to integrate it into our main Android 15 QPR2 based branch ourselves but we can also simply wait a couple months. As an earlier example, the Pixel 8a was released in May 2024 based on Android 14 QPR1 rather than the current Android 14 QPR2. It was incorporated into mainline Android 14 QPR3 in June only a few weeks later. We know Android 16 is already going to deal with this so spending our time on this instead of implementing new privacy, security, usability and compatibility improvements would be a waste.

mixmastamyk 1y ago

Anyone know why drivers in this OS can't be ported to Linux, so it could support newer phones as well?

strcat 1y ago
Android Open Source Project and operating systems based on it like GrapheneOS are Linux distributions. The kernel drivers are Linux kernel drivers. The userspace drivers are part of Android's Treble hardware abstraction layer providing forwards compatibility with future Android releases and SELinux-based sandboxing with the drivers split up into isolated processes. Most of the driver complexity is in userspace with most kernel drivers acting as shims between the isolated drivers and the hardware. It's done that way for practical reasons on Android but it's good for security. Treble's compatibility system isn't very relevant to us right now. There's a new Android release every month: a monthly, quarterly or yearly release. The devices we currently support (Pixels) receive each of these updates officially. Most Android devices do not get the monthly or quarterly updates, only the yearly ones. Other devices rely on partial backports of security patches (Android Security Bulletins) to an initial release, which are provided for ~3-4 years after the initial yearly release. If we supported typical Android devices with that situation, then we'd at least partially rely on Treble to provide the latest OS version. Pixels are currently the only devices meeting our hardware security requirements listed at https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices. Having proper updates for 7 years from launch is just part of that, most of the requirements are for hardware-based security features like the secure element features, hardware memory tagging, pointer authentication, USB controller support for blocking new connections and disabling USB data, etc. GrapheneOS uses the 6.1 and 6.6 long term support branches of the Linux kernel with 6.12 as the next one that's likely going to be used to replace 6.6 for on-device virtual machines and the emulator with Android 16.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > The kernel drivers are Linux kernel drivers. But they're drivers that are not upstreamed and which therefore make it hard to move to a newer kernel, right?

kowabungalow 1y ago

Also, this is the first pixel after this announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43485950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43485950

codethief 1y ago
Oh wow, how did I miss that! If strcat / Daniel Micay happens to pass by: How much will this impact future development of GrapheneO?
- strcat 1y ago
  The changes are overstated in the media and has little impact on it. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43674145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43674145. We would benefit a lot from early access to quarterly and yearly releases but that hasn't ever been public and the AOSP main branch only provided the most recent changes for a few components, and not any of the ones we actually need most.
  - codethief 1y ago
    Thanks!
strcat 1y ago
The changes are overstated and it really changes very little for GrapheneOS. See https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/21315-explanation-of-recent-changes-to-aosp-and-the-lack-of-major-impact-on-grapheneos https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/21315-explanation-of-recent.... Android already published the full source code for Stable releases but barely anything for Beta releases. They didn't publish anything for upcoming releases with support for new devices. AOSP main branch received most changes through the Stable releases being merged into it. Most components were developed internally. Certain components were developed publicly in AOSP so they had to repeatedly merge back and forth between the internal and public main branches. GrapheneOS would benefit from having early access to the monthly, quarterly and yearly releases as Android OEM partners do. The only benefit of having access to the main development branch would be the ability to backport more fixes than they do along with doing it earlier. We occasionally backported fixes from AOSP main for the few components developed publicly through it, which is what's going to be mostly going away. It was a big help to us as access to the upcoming quarterly and yearly releases would be. Monthly updates are too small for it to really matter but it'd still help. Also worth noting the monthly security patch backports (Android Security Bulletins) are a separate thing from the new OS release each month. Those are backports of many of the High and Critical severity patches to older Android versions, often a month or two after they were released in the actual OS releases each month which are the monthly, quarterly and yearly releases (it's one of the 3 each month, with 3 quarterly releases and 1 yearly release per year although Android 16 is coming earlier this year instead of a 3rd quarterly release).