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A comment on Germany wants smartphone makers to offer 7 years of software updates. Parent comment

Re:Germany wants smartphone makers to offer 7 years of softw... by zozbot234 on Monday September 06, 2021 @12:25PM (#28435291)
> and by the way, a bunch of chipset blobs will be compiled against those kernel headers, so changing kernel versions is pretty much impossible

Binary drivers can be reverse engineered and reimplemented for the new kernel. This takes a lot of effort since it requires following a "proper" clean-room methodology when doing so for interoperability purposes, but is otherwise doable. A complementary approach is to forward port the minimum set of features that's required for Android 12 to the older kernel, in a way that carefully preserves the portions of in-kernel ABI that the binary drivers depend on.

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Re:Germany wants smartphone makers to offer 7 years of softw... by google234123 on Monday September 06, 2021 @02:59PM (#28436813)
Reversing engineering is hard. It would be nice if the kernel didn’t trash it’s ABI all the time for ideological reasons. Hopefully a new OS (fuscia) will fix this.
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