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With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

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Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#51

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

orbifold wrote: post #36
MattSteelblade wrote: post #7

Describing Linux as "horrendously difficult to use" is disingenuous at best. There are so many different variations between distros and what people mean when they say "Linux" that to categorize them all in this tone is hardly professional. I'm not familiar with betanews.com, but it does claim to be a tech site.

Try getting any moderately complicated software to work on more than one distribution at once. There is a reason why people keep inventing variations of https://github.com/LLNL/spack , docker, virtual machines. Distribution packages are usually horribly outdated, broken or both (Arch Linux is one slightly better example). Professional software on Linux is usually tied to some old RedHat Enterprise Linux Distribution…

AppImages are a way to allow devs to distribute linux software that will run on any linux machine, by packing in dependencies.

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#52

Post by pritambaral »

ryukafalz wrote: post #28
fithisux wrote: post #21

The only kernel requirement that they should mandate is that the kernel should remain blob free. Checkout/build/boot.

And when the (often device-specific) kernel you're checking out has known vulnerabilities that have long since been fixed in mainline? Yeah, no, I'm glad they're doing this.

If the device-specific kernel doesn't require blobs, it is easier to upstream the changes. If the device-specific kernel requires blobs on top of mainline, you're screwed either way.

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#53

Post by pen2l »

newforice wrote: post #27
rayiner wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's part of the problem. You face a problem, look online for a solution, and find answers that pertain only to different distros than what you're using. It hasn't gotten much better as far as I can tell. I used Linux as my primary desktop for a few years around 2002-2005 (Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu). Back then, configuration was mostly automatic, though you had to do stuff like install the NVIDIA kernel blob manu…

It is frustrating how far Ubuntu has diverged from Debian. It used to be easy to set up a remote desktop, I can't even get it to work in Ubuntu 16 now, just tried the other day too.

What if you use Teamviewer? It seems to support both Ubuntu/Debian and Fedora/CentOS, etc.

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#54

Post by garaetjjte »

zanny wrote: post #31
_pmf_ wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AIUI, the situation until now has been that essentially, every Android device released has its own fork of Android. Which is absurd, and explains why the Android security update situation is such a mess. The situation is the same for all embedded Linux devices. All have non-mainlined (and non-sidelined) changes to device tree, startup code, pin muxing code, special kernel parameters, special drivers, specially adju…

> if every vendor has the same issues Except every vendor doesn't . By some magic voodoo witchcraft, x86 remains consistently capable of producing a single kernel that can run on anything from Intel or AMD. Because they upstream their platform support. That is literally it. No, it is not a technical impossibility of the ARM world to support common hardware abstractions like IBM-PC platforms. They choose not to.

It also helps that kernel contains tons of quirks/bugs detection for x86 hardware.

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#55

Post by kevingadd »

majewsky wrote: post #42
kevingadd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experiences are similar. The more time passes the harder (???) it gets to work with Linux. I had to bump my Linode machines forward to avoid getting left behind by the Ubuntu upgrade train and the transition to systemd broke all my services and made everything harder to debug. Not pleasant. I used to operate under the assumption that I could sit down and use Linux if I needed to - and I started a job that required…

> made everything harder to debug It's not harder, it's just different. As a counterpoint, I never figured out how sysvinit works and got by with guesswork and Stack Overflow answers. And I hated how logs were scattered all over the place. Nowadays you have systemctl(1) and journalctl(1) which are exceptionally well-documented in their manpages, and now services and logs work the same all the time across all distros.…

I believe you, but design decisions like 'the systemd utilities for controlling services exit silently with no output even when they fail to start a service' definitely make it hard to learn the new systems.

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#56

Post by remir »

sverige wrote: post #29

Some have speculated that Fuchsia will eventually replace Android. I remember back in May that some prototype UI was introduced by Google. Anyone know of any recent developments on this front?

Magenta (their new microkernel) is being renamed Zircon as they reorganize the OS into layers named on gemstones.

As for the UI, their new compositor requires a GPU with Vulkan support to make it run. Unfortunately QEMU doesn't support Vulkan at the moment, so I wasn't able to test it.

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#57

Post by ryukafalz »

pritambaral wrote: post #52
ryukafalz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when the (often device-specific) kernel you're checking out has known vulnerabilities that have long since been fixed in mainline? Yeah, no, I'm glad they're doing this.

If the device-specific kernel doesn't require blobs, it is easier to upstream the changes. If the device-specific kernel requires blobs on top of mainline, you're screwed either way.

Well, true - though in most cases I'd imagine the blobs are firmware that would otherwise be burned onto the peripheral ROM and aren't too closely tied to the kernel itself. IANAL, but you'd have a heck of a time arguing that a blob shipped with a device's kernel wasn't a derivative work if it linked with kernel sources.

On the other hand, it's possible to upstream the changes, but if you're dealing with anything like Qualcomm's 1.7 million line kernel fork[0] it's exceedingly unlikely if you're not the SoC manufacturer. And if you're not able to upstream them, you're stuck backporting security patches til the end of time/you throw the device out.

[0] https://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides...

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#58

Post by hathawsh »

orbifold wrote: post #36
MattSteelblade wrote: post #7

Describing Linux as "horrendously difficult to use" is disingenuous at best. There are so many different variations between distros and what people mean when they say "Linux" that to categorize them all in this tone is hardly professional. I'm not familiar with betanews.com, but it does claim to be a tech site.

Try getting any moderately complicated software to work on more than one distribution at once. There is a reason why people keep inventing variations of https://github.com/LLNL/spack , docker, virtual machines. Distribution packages are usually horribly outdated, broken or both (Arch Linux is one slightly better example). Professional software on Linux is usually tied to some old RedHat Enterprise Linux Distribution…

That may be so, but it is unfortunate that the author tacked on a highly subjective first paragraph to an otherwise informative article. Who regards Linux as "horrendously difficult to use" and why? That's a strong statement that needs explicit justification or citation in any trustworthy publication. We shouldn't have to guess the author's intent. This article makes me not want to find out any more about this news site.

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#59

Post by rbanffy »

fmntf wrote: post #26
castratikron wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drivers can be built as modules most of the time. Google could still ship a single kernel binary and any vendor that had a weird quirk could load their own module. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if Google requires every driver to be built as a module and they ship a minimal core kernel.

Unfortunately there is no binary compatibility between modules and different kernels. Moreover Google recommends CONFIG_MODVERSIONS=y, which prevents to load even practically compatible modules.

The vendor would need to recompile their modules for every kernel Google releases, but that's not a huge issue - how many times does Google update the kernel?

Re: With Android Oreo, Google is introducing Linux kernel requirements

#60

Post by belovedeagle »

microtonal wrote: post #49
cat199 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this situation doesn't apply to windows or macos how, exactly?

since there wouldn't be hundreds of different Ubuntu versions and sub-distros There are no macOS or Windows subdistros. So, the only difference may be between different versions. Adding to that, Apple generally does not have the tendency to replace/rewrite macOS subsystems every few years, so it is much more likely that thing still work after a couple of years.

> There are no ... Windows subdistros

That's a pretty naive trust in Microsoft's branding/marketing team. Of course there are heaps of different Windows distributions. They don't necessarily differ as much as, say, Ubuntu vs Gentoo, but they do differ.

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