Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ech000 2724 days ago
Can anyone recommend a post that introduces these kind of issues for Android outsiders?

I assumed Android ROMs carry a fully fledged distribution, including the kernel and firmware. Sure, the latter might be out of date.

When I tried digging into the question "where does this so-called open source come from", I stumbled upon Kernels that basically have one commit adding the whole blob.

Is the ROM merely the application software built for a target kernel (which is persistent on the device)?

I've hacked around with Kernel modules on Android before, but miss the big picture in that regard.

Edit: especially the new update infrastructure (treble?), Does it change anything here?
1 comments
voltagex_ 2722 days ago
The ROM is kinda an inaccurate term for the whole "blob" of binaries that gets copied to eMMC (or similar) storage. This can include multiple partitions, firmware updates (including for your baseband) etc.

The device kernel is a fork of https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... or more accurately https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/kernel/andro... at the end of the day. The "whole thing as one commit" is just people not caring enough to maintain source history.

Treble seems to mean that the software can be updated separately from the drivers and the firmware - https://www.androidauthority.com/project-treble-818225/, it could actually make things worse in terms of out of date drivers and firmware.

link