Bringing Android closer to the mainline

Posted Dec 21, 2011 18:11 UTC (Wed) by tbird20d (subscriber, #1901)
In reply to: Bringing Android closer to the mainline by job
Parent article: Bringing Android closer to the mainline

Is it out of the question for Android to transition some kernel interfaces to more generic ones in the future? Most programs end users care about are written either for Dalvik or using NDK and shouldn't care much about wakelocks or logging for example.

See the mailing list for some discussion of this. In general, it is conceivable to transition to more generic interfaces. However, for each one you have to evaluate what the impact is to existing code throughout user space. For example, most programs doing logging are not directly making Linux system calls, and there is likely some flexibility there to change the interface if needed. The question, IMHO, is how much change is really needed.