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Nexus One First Phone Linus Torvalds "Doesn't Hate"
SpuriousLogic writes "Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux kernel, has an absolute disdain for mobile phones. All of the ones he has purchased in the past, the man writes on his personal blog, ended up being 'mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights' even though they were naturally all phones run on open source operating systems. Things have changed now, he adds, now that he has caved and bought Google's Nexus One a couple of days ago."
here
Linus appears to have less hysterical take on the Android Linux fork than most people:
I don't worry about out-of-tree development for odd devices too much. I wish we could merge android, but I also accept it likely being a few years away. We had similar out-of-tree issues with the SGI extreme scalability stuff, and it took quite a while before the standard kernel merged all of that.
big iron != bare metal, which is what GP presumably meant.
Dude, as a phone the N900 lacks a LOT. I was able to sell mine on Ebay to buy a unlocked Nexus One.
I tried to love the N900, as I loved my N710. but it's clunky.
This is coming from a guy that has been die-hard Nokia forever. I tried like heck to love my Nokia 5800 xpressmusic phone. it had a great idea, but was only half there. They almost made it, but not close enough for me to suffer using it day in and day out.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well, it's not technically Linux these phones use, as it's now an incompatible Linux fork. So, I guess like the authors of this article, the company told Linus to go fork himself.
Well, what you're saying is not technically true either.
These phones absolutely do run the Linux kernel and anyone who says otherwise is misleading at best and trolling at worst. Period. Just because a single device driver was recently removed from the official source tree does not suddenly make the kernel any less Linux. To suggest that's the case is ignorance or stupidity.
The reality is, Android uses their own driver for power management. Their design stinks. They've refused to maintain it in the official source tree. The stinking, unmaintained driver was removed. Despite no longer being maintained in the official source tree, Google continues to maintain it in their own kernel tree - which is freely accessible to all. This was all previously covered here on /. Having said all that, it is extremely common for external drivers to be maintained outside of the official source tree for a variety of reasons. This is one of the primary reasons the dkms project exists.
Furthermore, since the source portion of Android's framework which accesses the power management driver is freely available, if someone wanted to, they could easily change the internal implementation to use Linux's official power management interface rather than Google's driver. Battery life is likely to only slightly suffer. And with small improvements to Linux's existing power management infrastructure, to bring it more in line with Google's implementation goals, battery life parity can be achieved while maintaining full Android compatibility.
At the end of the day, removal of the driver from the official source tree changes nothing for anyone.
Obligatory Ass Pennies
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress