News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video].

Re:Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video] by dimensionc132 on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @07:06PM (#32572762)
A typical Linux distro ISO is about 2Gb in size and this distro has all the necessary drivers and hardware devices to run on thousands of different computers with different configurations.

Android "AOSP" however has to be customized for every single cell phone model because it doesn't have the device drivers added but it does use the Linux kernel.

Why can't AOSP just include all the necessary device drivers for all the mobile phone models, just like what Linux does for computers?

Then we could have a universal AOSP distro for phones

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video] by faisalhackshah on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @11:21PM (#32574623)
Because mobile (basically ARM) is not a standardized platform like the PC. PC architecture has dozens of interoperability standards the entire PC ecosystem adheres to. Everything from boot up, to DMA controllers, to protocols for device capability discovery, and more .. You can think of each ARM board as its own bespoke platform (needing it's own device tree/bsp).
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is there hope for Linux on smartphones? [video] by seba_dos1 on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @07:41PM (#32573099)
The talk explains that - you could make an universal AOSP image that works on mainlined devices, so you could support the whole handful of them at this moment.
[ Parent | on HN ]