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Why Samsung?

Added by Raghav Gururajan over 4 years ago

Hello Replicant!

I was wondering why Replicant Project primarily chose Samsung devices? That too S and Note series?

Thank you!

Regards,
RG.


Replies (2)

RE: Why Samsung? - Added by Kurtis Hanna over 4 years ago

Hello RG,

We do support the Galaxy Nexus in Replicant 6, which I think is made by both Google and Samsung, but yeah, all of our other devices are solely Samsung. I can't speak with 100% certainty for the historical reason for this choice, but I suspect it is related to good upstream support of Samsung devices in LineageOS (formerly cyanogenmod).

As for our focus on Samsung for the last two years or so, the focus has stayed on Samsung, and specifically devices with the exynos4412 SoC, due to the fact that Samsung paid their developers to provide mainline kernel support for this SoC for a devboard they were using to test Tizen on. Forkbomb from LineageOS followed up that work by getting a few of our supported devices (the midas family) upstreamed into the mainline linux kernel. This article from over a year ago describes some of this: https://www.xda-developers.com/samsung-galaxy-siii-samsung-galaxy-note-ii-htc-hd2/

The sense that I'm getting is that we likely will all feel so spoiled from here on out by having mainline linux support upstream that we will only support devices with mainline linux from now on. This likely will include the Samsung Galaxy S3, Note 2, Note 8.0, and Note 10.1. We likely won't support any other Samsung devices moving forward unless they also have the exynos4412 SoC (like the Samsung Galaxy Pop, Samsung Galaxy Light, or Samsung Galaxy Camera 2) or unless other Samsung devices get mainline linux support (which seems unlikely, but could happen).

we haven't decided officially on what devices to target after our work on these Samsung 4412 devices are near completion (which likely will take many months at least), but devices with imx8, OP1 (Rockchip rk3399), Allwinner A64 all look like possible candidates for Replicant 9 support and Samsung doesn't make any devices with these SoCs that I know of.

Cordially,
Kurtis

RE: Why Samsung? - Added by Raghav Gururajan over 4 years ago

Thank you Kurtis!

Regards,
RG.

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