Discombobulate Linux

This project is an attempt at cleaning up Android vendor kernels.

The wiki is a work in progress and currently not much more than a stub.

Currently the plan is to have three parts of this project:

1. Tooling: Develop tools that can categorize the patches in a vendor’s version of a Linux kernel into different buckets: vendor specfic, also found in another tree, cherry picked from elsewhere, etc. This will be useful to determine which patches have to be ported when porting them to a newer release. Often vendors are not cooperating with the Free Software movement to make this job easier, so this kind of source-level reverse engineering is required.

2. Phone kernel: Based on the tools, port patches to a newer kernel release. Initially the latest release of the kernel version used on the device, later ideally a newer LTS kernel. Currently my main target is Samsung Galaxy S9 because that’s what I have. Ideally, this work would be extended to different phones, and other groups of maintainers pick up the tooling to do so.

3. Documentation: Document findings about the Samsung kernel, so that an in-depth documentation of this kernel’s specific changes exists. Also the development of the tooling and general development progress will be documented in the form of a devlog in this wiki.