Re:There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use
by asveikau on Monday November 13, 2017 @09:19PM
(#15692100)
Why does the kernel and driver ABI matter for upgrading userland? On desktop Linux I can by and large use a new kernel and chroot into an old install, or vice versa, and things still work. It would seem that Android userland is unnecessarily coupled to a specific kernel version. It should be able to upgrade independently.
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Re:There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use
by kelnos on Monday November 13, 2017 @09:30PM
(#15692139)
Agreed in principle, but a decent amount of the new security features present in more recent Android phones are due to new kernel features. It's just a sign of the relative immaturity of the platform that this is the case.
Re:There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use
by asveikau on Monday November 13, 2017 @09:40PM
(#15692182)
Can you provide some detailed examples of that being the case? Genuinely curious to know.
Usually I hear that sort of thing and think somebody isn't being creative enough with fallback behaviors for when the feature isn't there, but I guess it would depend heavily on what the feature is.
Re:There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use
by kelnos on Tuesday November 14, 2017 @08:45PM
(#15700877)
I guess I probably misspoke. I was thinking about https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/08/hardening-... ... but those certainly don't require userspace changes (probably). And even the case where you'd want the new kernel features (but can't upgrade due to driver ABI incompatibilities), they've backported to several old kernels that are in wide use in Android... though I note that my 2-year-old phone is on an older kernel than most of those features were backported to.