Re: Forked android kernel development from linux kernel mainline

From: david
Date: Sat Nov 06 2010 - 20:01:40 EST


On Sat, 6 Nov 2010, Ted Ts'o wrote:

On Sat, Nov 06, 2010 at 09:40:34PM +0200, Anca Emanuel wrote:
I think you need to see this: https://review.source.android.com/#change,18761
And this: http://galaxytab.samsungmobile.com/

What about them? Yes, the Android developers are pushing changes to
mainstream where it makes sense; they were doing this before the
wakelocks contrversy, and they're continuing to do it now. But in the
case of wakelocks, it may be that it's going to have to be a case of
"agree to disagree".

All distributions, including Red Hat and SLES has in the shipped
product with patches that have never hit mainstream, and in some
cases, will never get merged with mainstream. A good example in the
past was the 4G/4G patch. Another one, which is still on-going, is
the Systemtap/utrace patches. Yet no one is killing megawatts worth
of electrons about how Red Hat and SLES are forking the kernel. They
push patches upstream where they can, and where they can't --- they do
what they need to do to satisify and delight their customers.

(Heck, Sony is still using a 2.2 kernel for some of their products
with a huge bunch of patches and no one is toasting them for forking
the kernel....)

the difference is that these other patches that you are talking about do not result in incompatible userspace (or at least, they don't except for very specialied apps).

also, none of these other patches resulted in device drivers developed for a distro being incompatible with mainline.

I think that the concerns from technical folks (as opposed to journalists/bloggers) would go down drastically if there was some acceptable way for the incompatible bits (like wakelocks) could be stubbed out so that the rest of the things could be moved easily.

David Lang

Move along, there's nothing to see. Other that money for
journalists/bloggers who are gunning for advertising clicks by
whipping up controversy where IMHO, none deserves to exist.

- Ted
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