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Android and the Linux Kernel Community
An anonymous reader links to Greg Kroah-Hartman's explanation of a rift (hopefully mendable) in the development culture of Google's Linux-based Android OS and the Linux kernel itself. "As the Android kernel code is now gone from the Linux kernel, as of the 2.6.33 kernel release, I'm starting to get a lot of questions about what happened, and what to do next with regards to Android. So here's my opinion on the whole matter ..."
Google has a major advantage here as one of the largest companies in the world
Nokia has the major advantage that they are *the* largest phone producer on the face of the planet and have *the* largest world market share by a large percentage. Google and particularly, Android are small fry in comparison, despite their size in other markets. Those companies jumping on Android are dumb because their horizon is limited to the US market and a single platform.
For irony, Google "Maemo" and "Nokia N900".
As I said, the only groups being hurt by this are Google and those dumb enough to rely on Android for their future, anyone else with a brain will take a look at the competition and more open platforms.
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Google has frankly set a new standard as far as how companies can become very successful by embracing the open and free software communities. I honestly don't think you can point to many other companies that are doing better, nor could you realistically expect to. In the mobile space, pretty much the next nearest competitor in terms of openness is Apple (Darwin, et al) - in other words, a joke. Meanwhile Google not only has a wonderfully organized system for playing with all the Android code, but a broad commitment across products. Look at Wave, for instance - wide, wide open, and very deliberately (because they know it cannot succeed any other way). Google has probably done more for Linux and its credibility than most other companies in the world.
I think this is something totally different - a disagreement about direction between the mainline maintainers and Google's Android team. Corporate developers, even well-intentioned ones, have a conceptual hurdle to get over when someone Not Their Manager is telling them "you must spend x man-months refactoring your code thusly."
Many, many companies have run into this issue with Linux (and other projects) before, and many will again. It usually goes something like this:
Step 1: Whatever. We're Google. Am I going to rearrange my whole development roadmap to follow the directions of some whiny nerd in his mom's basement? LOL.
Step 2: Oh. Crap. Wow it is kind of a lot work maintaining my own entire fork of the Linux kernel/KHTML/etc. all by myself.
Step 3: Either A) capitulation - the last guy is fired or smacked with the clue stick, and the cooperation restarts, or B) a true fork. These usually stagnate and die, and are also riddled with bugs and security holes btw... unless, the fork is really more interesting than what it forked from, in which case, the community switches to the fork and justice is served.
Often between Step 1 and 2, the maintainer will attempt to play a little corporate politics by embarrassing said middle manager in the media. By the way, this is pretty smart and it often works - especially with companies as large but otherwise savvy as Google, a slashdot story can jumpstart efforts to mend the rift by bringing more senior eyes on the problem. Cooperating is in everyone's interest, and they will realize it.
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I'm commenting anonymously because I'm closely involved with Android. I'm not going to comment on whether wakelocks are good or bad.
But mjg59's comment about ARM retention state being as good as suspend is blatantly wrong at a SoC level. There are several good reasons why a suspend details is better than retention but I can't go into the details due to NDAs. But I can vouch that I have personally seen power usage shoot up on well known Android phones when suspend is disabled and only retention is done.
So, mjg59, I would kindly request that you stop making such claims. I doubt you have worked on embedded devices -- I believe you work on server level stuff -- but you most certainly haven't worked extensively on the SoCs being used on Android phones.
Just to make my stance clear, I'm all for having the Android kernel merged into mainline.
So, mjg59, I would kindly request that you stop making such claims. I doubt you have worked on embedded devices -- I believe you work on server level stuff -- but you most certainly haven't worked extensively on the SoCs being used on Android phones.
I have worked on embedded devices - Linux based and others - for over a decade, and mjg59 is right. If you need something as brutal as hard suspend mode, you're doing it wrong. Any serious low power optimized ARM SoC can run down to very low current when idle, and has peripherals which can be individually clocked down and/or gated. I did work in a periphery way on the G1 at Google, and was very surprised at the way power gating was done. Put simply: the only other embedded OS in the same class as Android which does power gating like this is Windows Mobile. Everyone else learned it was unnecessary a long time ago. I was fairly shocked how few engineers had ever done serious embedded work before, and the result shows.
I know the Qualcomm parts have horrendously stupid design decisions in them which prevent decent idle current, but it's a wash compared to the other sources of battery drain. It's also a wash compared to the damage it does to your code design to support full suspend as part of normal per-second operation.
The Linux maintainers are right: Android is just doing it the wrong way. If there's any one feature I think Android could have done without, it's wake-locks. Learn how to use fine-grained clock switching and gating, not brutally-coarse-grained suspend. This isn't a bloody laptop. And no, I'm not saying this as a back seat driver: I really have done this kind of crap for a decade.