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Antonio Ospite, attacchi teoristici

Xin He from Amlogic informed me that the linux kernel source code for their AML8726-MX SoC has been released:

Hi Antonio,

Amlogic just posted MX kernel source code (branch ics-mx-develop) on openlinux.
Here is the link:
http://openlinux.amlogic.com/download/linux/GPL_code_release/2012-08-03/kernel-common-2012-08-03-git-a63244fb9c.tar.gz

AML8726-MX (code named MESON6) is the base of a lot of Android tablets from Chinese system integrators/distributors, like the ones from Ainol for instance; I was even considering getting one of them myself and try to get Debian running on it, but I haven't made up my mind yet.

A tarball is not the ideal medium to release kernel code, a public git repository would have been the best way to do it, but it is more than enough for Amlogic to comply to the GPL; the code seems to be based on the Android common kernel code in particular on the andoid-3.0 branch, with some other fixes from different linux-stable releases on top.

The complete archive from Amlogic is about 107 MiB, I took some time to isolate the Amlogic changes and here is a compressed patch (4 MiB, about 40 MiB uncompressed) if you want to take a look. The patch contains also code from other Amlogic platforms, it applies cleanly on top of the android-3.0 branch of the Android common Kernel code, and “almost cleanly” on top of the v3.0.31 branch of the linux-stable tree.

The released code is the one Amlogic uses on their own products and the one provided to system integrators using Amlogic products, however Amlogic confirmed that it is not unusual for system integrators to make changes to the code themselves, like adding new device drivers; so if you have a final product with AM8726-MX on board which is not directly from Amlogic you may still want to contact the manufacturer to get the source code correspondent to the GPL binaries shipped on the device.

This story made me think about companies basing their code on top of android kernels instead of mainline linux, is this something that other companies are doing as well?