On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Yes. That's what makes me wonder about some parts of the discussion > here. Getting the drivers for one or more of the android plattforms > in is not a problem. I'd say it could have easily been done with the > manweeks spent arguing in this and related threads. > > The much bigger issues is to get android userspace running on a more > or less vanilla kernel, that is withoutthe binder, without the rather > interesting group ID based security hack^H^H^H^Hmodel, without the > suspend blocker userspace API and so on, and so on. Somebody will have to broker a deal with the frameworks/apps folks to get rid of the binder. They like it a lot. Of course if somebody built a drop-in replacement for the userspace side that didn't require a kernel driver, had the same performance characteristics, solved the same problems, etc, they could probably make an argument for it (or just provide it as a drop-in replacement for people who want a more "pure" linux underneath Android, even if we didn't pick it up). The group ID stuff works incredibly well for gating device access -- we ensure that devices that need access from various processes end up with perms like 0660 root audio (say for a raw audio interface), and then we assure that processes which have the "may use audio hardware" permission are executed with audio as an additional group. We ended up using the same model to control socket, raw socket, and bt socket access because at the time we could not find a reasonable way to grant or exclude such permissions on a process by process basis. Maintaining about 20-30 lines of diffs to make that work was not a bad tradeoff (and we don't expect those patches to go upstream). If there's a way to accomplish this without patching the kernel, we're all ears. While we do maintain some assorted patches to core code (like the permissions thing), we strongly prefer to keep our work localized to drivers (generic to android or specific to hardware), and try to migrate to common kernel features when possible, submit patches (like work Mike Chan is doing around cpufreq and power measurement), etc. Patches to core code cause more headaches when we rebase up to new kernel versions, after all. > So for people who really care about running a mainline kernel on their > android device doing that part first on a generic ARM board in qemu > might be much better first step work. > On the other hand I've heard > that various hardware vendors or parties closed to them are rather > annoyed by their drivers beeing stuck in the android tree - but that > can be easily solved by getting removing the suspend blockers (at least > temporarily), cleaning up a few bits here and there and getting them in. This continues to baffle me. If we (Google) are such a headache, why not just route around us. The drivers we've written are GPLv2, the source is out there for anyone who wants it, etc. The drivers other people have written we have no control over at all. From my point of view it'd be an annoyance if somebody took the code we wrote, modified it heavily, and pushed it upstream, but fundamentally I can't stop that from happening other than by pushing it upstream myself, first. Blaming me because you want me to send your drivers upstream and I'm not doing it or not doing it fast enough or not doing it the way you like does not seem very productive. I'm not a gatekeeper for patch submission to the mainline kernel. Brian -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-omap" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
