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Project To Mainline Android Kernel Changes Formed
ghostoftiber writes "From the article: 'Tim Bird, a Sony engineering veteran and the chair of the Architecture Group of the Linux Foundation's CE Workgroup, has announced a new concerted effort to get Android's changes to the Linux kernel back into the mainline Linux kernel tree.' Android has been using Linux 2.6.x for its devices since its release, with patches from Google. To date they haven't been merged back into the kernel mainline but existed on kernel.org. Some of the features such as wakelocks would help with Linux tablet projects, but other features aren't fully realized and support remains spotty. The radio interface layer ... still exists as an ATI/Nvidia-esque shim loader scheme with modem 'drivers' being nothing more than ihex files loaded by open code."
On nearly all devices the RIL is in userland.
On Samsung GalaxyS devices, the modem was attached to a serial port and the RIL translated Android RIL function calls into modem AT commands. The kernel part of the radio interface was a serial port driver, nothing more.
Same for most HTC devices, although some that used Qualcomm MSM implemented a pseudo-tty implemented over shared memory - but it was still AT commands being transferred. Other Qualcomm AMSS functions were implemented using an RPC-over-shared-memory interface, the kernel portion of this was small.
Galaxy S II devices (at least GSM Exynos-based ones) have the radio hung as a USB device off of the CPU, so it did require a driver to implement. Still, most of the RIL is in userland, and the RIL belongs there.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It's a loosing battle, now.
Linux is already so retarded that I doubt anybody will notice. We've long reached the stage where there's far too much stuff in the mainline kernel. Every other option is now "WTF is this?" -- where I once understood every single configuration option.
Linus, you don't have to post as an AC.