Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone

Re:Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone by 908B64B197 on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @06:59PM (#30079874)

Part of the problem here is that SoC drivers are hacked on top of the kernel (and are not merged in-tree). So SoC vendors have this pile of legacy and hacked-on code they need to cherry-pick every time the Kernel changes an interface they used (which is a lot) [0]. Of course, that costs and fortune and hampers the sales of newer chipsets so it’s not in the SoC vendor’s interest to do so.

I was hopeful with Windows Phone running a build of NT that the platform would still have the same strict ABI compatibility for drivers as the desktop version has. So you get kernel updates and the existing drivers just work.

Now, with Windows getting some emulation support for Linux (one of their Subsystems for Linux effectively translates system calls and execution happens in the NT kernel) I wonder if they could ship a phone running NT with an Android userland.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_binary_interface

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Re:Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone by iforgotpassword on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @03:22AM (#30083092)

Congrats, you just figured out what Microsoft created that translation layer for. ;-)

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Re:Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone by zeusk on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @02:40PM (#30090606)

Windows 11 ships Android userland out of band (as an optional feature).

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