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With Android Oreo, Google Is Introducing Linux Kernel Requirements (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson shares a report from BetaNews: As is easy to tell by comparing versions of Android from different handset manufacturers, developers are -- broadly speaking -- free to do whatever they want with Android, but with Oreo, one aspect of this is changing. Google is introducing a new requirement that OEMs must meet certain requirements when choosing the Linux kernel they use. Until now, as pointed out by XDA Developers, OEMs have been free to use whatever Linux kernel they wanted to create their own version of Android. Of course, their builds still had to pass Google's other tests, but the kernel number itself was not an issue. Moving forward, Android devices running Oreo must use at least kernel 3.18, but there are more specific requirements to meet as well. Google explains on the Android Source page: "Android O mandates a minimum kernel version and kernel configuration and checks them both in VTS as well as during an OTA. Android device kernels must enable the kernel .config support along with the option to read the kernel configuration at runtime through procfs."
With v4.13 just released!
It's a really new OS, then!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
This seems to me like a major hindrance for developers of custom firmwares. Since OEM's don't give a shit and don't release hardware blobs for their own devices, community developers had to use older kernels with new firmwares. For example my 4 year old Nexus 4 runs a bugfree custom Android 7.1.1 but the kernel is still the same as with 5.0, since Google stopped supporting the device and didn't release blobs for newer kernels. Now a kernel version of 3.18 for O seems fine, but there's no guarantee that newer firmwares won't have much higher requirements, like 4.0 for P etc. This would make many devices obsolete despite the high effort of those community developers, doing on their spare time the jobs that the OEM's should do.
If Google wanted to be serious about this they had to at least demand of OEM's to publish hardware blobs from now on for newer kernels. But it seems that this action is just another another step by big G to help the OEM's to accomplish more easily their planned obsolescence for any device which is over a year old.