I found out that Fairphone is using the Linux Kernel 4.19.157-perf+ which is completely ancient. Just for your understanding, 4.19 got released in october 2018 and my Fedora runs on 6.5.5.
Is this an Android thing to use old Kernels or is Fairphone doing some weird things? And doesn’t that affect security severly?
It’s an Android thing, see here for a nice overview of the problem and Google’s recent work to fix it…
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Oh, ok. But a 5 year old kernel is still too old imo. I mean the lts support will end next year but fairphone still wants to support the fp4 for more than one year. Do we know, where the bottleneck is? Is it fairphone or qualcomm?
I’ve reported this to support. The answer was that it is highly improbable FP4 will ever see a newer kernel minor or major version.
Generally, bugfixes are getting in, that’s good and keeps your phone safe. What it bigger problem is hardware drivers. For example you can’t use 2.5 Gbps Ethernet adapters because their support was added in kernel 5.11.
But is it Fairphone who doesn’t want to update or is it Qualcomms fault because they don’t provide a new Version?
Not sure. But according to Kernels comuns do Android | Android Open Source Project , FP4 can stay on 4.19 and that’s okay from Android point of view.
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An overview
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