It's Possible To Get The Nexus 7 Running On A Mainline Linux Kernel

Written by Michael Larabel in Google on 14 March 2016 at 08:30 PM EDT. 10 Comments
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With an effort led by John Stultz at Linaro, developers have managed to get a Google Nexus 7 tablet running on a mainline Linux kernel.

Open-source developers were able to get the Nexus 7 running on a mainline kernel plus about fifty extra patches, which are all open-source and available via a Linaro Git tree. They even managed to get accelerated open-source graphics for the Qualcomm SoC by using the Freedreno MSM DRM driver and Mesa Git.

Freedreno developer Rob Clark also commented for our article, "this is quite cool (especially when you realize that most android devices ship w/ a kernel that has a 1-2million loc delta from upstream)...upstream kernel with relatively small set of patches (~50 patches) running on nexus 7 w/ AOSP + freedreno + drm_panel driver."

More details on this accomplishment can be seen by this Google+ post by John Stultz.
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