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Comment by smnc | Hacker News Reader

> Is all we care about android? I constantly hear the argument, if we don't do all of this android will do their own thing and then that will be the end. Right now we are all suffering and android barely even using this yet. If Linux will carry on without AMD contributing maybe Linux will carry on ok without bending over backwards for android.

Could someone here fill in the details for the uninitiated? Do the kernel devs feel a pressure for the kernel to stay relevant in the Android world?

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I don't know the details either, but honestly, I'm amazed that Google hasn't just thrown Linux out and built a microkernel with a Linux-compatible syscall API. That way there's a single binary that only cares about standard ARM things like memory management and scheduling and doesn't require hardware vendors to tweak it for every new SoC. The SoC-specific drivers can be written and updated separately just like apps. Maybe then it would be easier for vendors to keep their shit updated so I don't have to throw out my perfectly good phone just because a company doesn't feel like porting their changes to a new kernel version.

They have, it's called Fuchsia. I think most the arguments for monokernels have weakened with age. You have L4 microkernels in every iPhone A7 processor now. The demands of security, crash resistance, and portability I think outweigh any small advantages in performance. We've got performance to waste these days, what we're lacking is more secure, crash resilient software.

And it's also not GPL, which means that vendors will be able to create fully proprietary versions of it. Yay?

The kernel developers don't really care about the GPL either, sorry to say. They don't go after violators, nor does the Linux Foundation, it seems. Linus himself has said that going after violators is in bad taste and poisons the well, vs just trying to be buddy-buddy and get them involved. Because obviously they'll just move away from Linux or whatever if you're a dick to them (except in the case where Linux effectively subsidizes their existence, making their product even possible). So, don't be a dick, and they'll come to you when you buy them a beer or whatever.

Which is clearly the reason why there aren't actually 14,000 different Android kernels and 2,000,000 different kernels for your $50 router running around. Because they all get involved, of course, from being so buddy buddy.

Naturally, this attitude costs Linux developers nothing at all for the most part, and keeps their lives easy (no legal shit, no hard times) -- while absolutely hurting users who can't get the source to their devices, and completely eviscerating the social/political capital of a license like the GPL, and all the people who use it.

When literally the biggest GPL success story can't get off their ass and prosecute license violators, who actually will care when you try to use it as a tool, one which actually has teeth to back it up? Why use a license if its major champion treats it like a complete piece of trash, a worthless bargaining chip, a chip which is only possible because of an effectively unique, lighning-in-a-bottle position?

If the kernel developers just don't give a shit about proprietary vendor kernel forks (I really, really don't think they really do, at least nobody with actual meaningful, large scale influence cares at all), and want to force involvement by "getting them in the cycle" and being buddy-buddy and just not-giving-a-fuck about people outside the source tree, making sure constant churn is how people have to keep up -- they should just use the BSD license.

It seems to have worked out pretty OK for LLVM, and this is basically their operating philosophy, too. At least then, maybe another project can arise that actually takes its own license terms halfway seriously...

Linus made the right engineering choice when he took the monolithic route in the 90's. However, the technical advantages of that architecture are now moot. Sooner-or-later, Google is going to get tired of Linux's shortcomings and build a replacement OS.

They seem to have started:

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia

They also have some folks working on Akaros. http://akaros.cs.berkeley.edu

Good luck getting the drivers working for all the esoteric USB/Bluetooth devices in the wild. IMO, Linux's greatest advantage is not it's technical architecture, but the breadth and depth of people and organizations working on it.

https://lwn.net/Articles/446297/ - 2011 https://lwn.net/Articles/481661/ - 2012 https://lwn.net/Articles/602521/ - 2014

Android is important, because it's successful, despite how crude it is. And the Kernel maintainers - basically as a modern-day abstracted version of self-preservation - want to see the mainline kernel in/on Android devices, and so they are thinking about __why__ Android had to fork. (Had to? Or were they just that stubborn and time-limited?)

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