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Monday, March 5, 2012

Hp Smartphone

So finally there is progress on this front that I am happy to make a public update about.

HP supports the community and was kind enough to provide us with the Android kernel source and some other GPL components that they modified for the few Touchpads that were accidentally released running Android.

Now the source provided so far misses one component still, the wifi driver. I did some digging around and it appears that the wifi driver shipped with both webOS and with the Android are GPL, there are multiple evidences of that including the driver licensing string.
Plus the driver is linked against 10+ GPLONLy kernel symbols which makes it kernel derivative. HP is still investigating this matter and we hope to hear from them soon.

What's interesting about this kernel is it seems to be a totally separate development from the webOS kernel (this was suspected from the very beginning), but now the comments in the code seem to imply that HP had another team working on Android port to Touchpad and that team appears to be totally separate from the webOS team. I wonder if that means there was a plan to ship the Touchpad with Android that were then preempted by webOS plans after Palm purchase.
Latest change in the code is from March 2011.

From this code we have already found a way to enable the debug serial console routed via audio jack.
Also it's interesting that audio ports are different and we are looking into how this could potentially be leveraged.
BT is implemented in a more straightforward way and I hope to adopt this into CM9 kernel as making more sense over what we have now.

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