OnePlus ships modern kernels.

My OnePlus 5 is using kernel 4.4.21 - this is with Nougat 7.1.1, by the way; no Oreo here yet.

OnePlus ships the kernel that Qualcomm gives them. The BSP for Snapdragon 835 (aka msm8998) is based on 4.4

Ok I am very disappointing with Google in that case

The kernel you get is entirely up to the SoC vendor.

Snapdragon 820/821 ships with 3.18. Snapdragon 830 ships with 4.4. Snapdragon 830+1 will ship with 4.9

There's a huge amount of work involved in porting a chipset from one kernel version to another. While I'm sure Google _could_ do it, it's ultimately not worth their while - they'd probably lose support from Qualcomm, and if they hit any weird bugs they'd be on their own.

I was surprised to read that in the article.

New android phones from top vendors (not the $50 junk devices) ship with 3.x kernels?

Wow.

3.x kernels with security patches. What seems to be the issue?

You can claim big rewards from Google if you report kernel exploits in Android.

> 3.x kernels with security patches. What seems to be the issue?

Limiting the scope of vulnerabilities before they are patched.

There's plenty of more recent defence-in-depth work that will make some vulnerabilities impossible to exploit on more recent kernels, and while they will get patched on the older kernels it'd still be nicer if they weren't exploitable in the first place.

Even without that there are lots of power saving fixes that get put into Linux with every release. That kind of stuff seems like it be very important in a phone as well.

Given Android has its own power management story independent of what upstream is doing those power changes are unlikely to be relevant or significant to Android.

I know (vaguely) that android has its own power management system, and I don't know how much it ties into what the kernel uses on a standard laptop.

But the changes to the normal kernel one as well as some of the changes in data structures are algorithms designed to be more efficient in the first place are probably still useful.

4.4 is old. Technology - especially software moves fast and it’s been 9 months since 4.4 was released. There’s been a lot of security, performance and feature improvements since 4.4 was released.

Major and/or userland problems don’t tend to occur as the kernel gets developed and released. There are major advantages in accepting new subsystem code over patched ‘legacy’ code.

I also have 3.18 on my Pixel XL. I assume the unreleased Pixel 2 devices will be running kernel 4.4 if that's what they targeted.

They probably wanted to back port it to 3.18 but it was too much work. I'm pretty disappointed they didn't move the Pixel forward to a new kernel though, this seems to be one of the biggest issues with Android.

This is an interesting case study in development cycles. The Pixel XL from October 2016 uses the Snapdragon 82x released in July 2016 but first announced in March 2015 and it uses a kernel from 2014 which gives us a hint about when driver development started.

I hope so, but given that 3.18 was released almost three years ago I am not holding my breath.

Quite disappointing, yet another bad example for OEMs.

The new pixel 2 phones coming out in October are on 4.4

I got the OnePlus 5 and it has kernel 4.4.21 tho using android 7.1

My Galaxy S8 is running kernel 4.4.16

My Nexus 5X, only a year older than your Pixel, is on 3.10, so it got none of these updates :(