Thread: Why are there no Kernels > 2.6.28 for n900
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Hurrian is offline Hurrian
2013-03-19 , 14:04
Posts: 1,225 | Thanked: 1,905 times | Joined on Feb 2011 @ Quezon City, Philippines
#5
Originally Posted by nebel View Post
why patches get backported to 2.6.28, instead of patching newer Kernels to support the old ABI
To save a 30 paragraph explanation:

It's asymptotically close to NP-hard, and seriously not worth doing given the limited resources devs have.

Originally Posted by Alecsandru View Post
(some of them are closed-source -powervr , navilink gps , ofono with its pulseaudio)
Let me just clear this up:
The PowerVR driver isn't a major blocker for new kernels. It is however, a major blocker for newer X.org versions, and decent power management (among other things that turn the OMAP 3430 into a power sink).
The other nigh-unmovable brick to N900 running on 99.9999% open drivers is the cellular modem (BB5).

Nokia has developed patches for Ofono (which is open source) to support the BB5 chip, and patches to support the serial interface between the OMAP and BB5.
As a result, calls and data work on non-Maemo systems (see Nemo).
Unfortunately, Nokia's development spending on Ofono's hardware adaptation for the N900 was cut short by the Elopocalypse, and thus a proper, open GPS driver never came out.
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Last edited by Hurrian; 2013-03-19 at 14:15.