[mappu]

Upgrading the core OS is hard mostly because new android versions rely on certain new kernel features; and the new kernels break backward compatibility with proprietary drivers.

There was a story posted a few weeks back about how a certain (Samsung or LG?) phone had added new members to the middle of a kernel struct, for the benefit of their camera driver. It hamstrung a lot of the community reverse engineering work to port a new kernel to the device.