The Linux Plumbers Conference is this week, and since Android is one of the biggest distributors of the Linux kernel in the world, Google software engineer Todd Kjos stopped by for a progress report from the Android team. Android 12—which will be out any day now—promises to bring Android closer than ever to mainline Linux by shipping Google’s “Generic Kernel Image” (GKI) to end-users.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Then SoC vendors like Qualcomm, Samsung, or MediaTek fork Android Common to make an SoC-specific kernel for each major chip release.
Android’s kernel fragmentation is a huge mess, and you can imagine how long and difficult the road is for a bugfix at the top of the fork tree to reach to the bottom, where end-users live.
The goal is for Google to fork the Linux kernel once for Android, instead of three times, and give SoC and device manufacturers space for their customizations via plug-in modules.
We’ve interviewed members of the Android team several times about the GKI, and the plan, eventually, is to be able to update not just LTS kernel versions through the Play Store, but also upgrade to major new releases.
The timeframe for shipping the GKI to consumers is “Android 12,” and since this core kernel work only happens on new devices, all eyes will be on the Pixel 6 to see how ambitious Google’s first swing at this will be.
Assuming the Pixel 6 ships with Linux kernel 5.10—which was called out several times in this talk—just that will be a big improvement over the usual two-year delay—5.10 was released in December 2020.
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