On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 04:07:27AM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
On Tuesday 10 December 2013, Mark Brown wrote:
That's not my experience especially once you get into phone type hardware - there's not much complexity difference when gluing things into the system and the fact that it's connected by the board increases the amount of flexibility that has to be coped with.
Yes, that is probably right. The only argument that one can make about the mobile phone case is that these devices are so complex that nobody even bothers any more running upstream kernels on them on any CPU architecture. If the kernel code is kept out of the mainline tree, it doesn't matter to us what they use, and the developers don't gain much by following any of the available firmware models either.
It's more of a commercial thing than a complexity thing (complexity adds a barrier but it's not fundamental) - the designs for phones aren't meaningfully different to those for tablets, and looking at both things like the ARM Chromeboos and what the low power Haswell stuff is doing laptops are looking an awful lot like tablets these days.