Recently Google and Oppo decided to develop necessary things for android and their devices and push it to the mainline Linux kernel… This makes maintaining things easier and longer lasting.
Will the fairphone company work on getting the mainline kernel to boot on their phones eventually by getting device trees and drivers for individual components into minus tree or will that come down to the community again?
Rhetorical question or would you like to ask support@fairphonedotcom 
This would depend on the individual component vendors e.g. Qualcomm mainlining their drivers, which hasn’t happened so far. On the other hand Google appears to be moving to mainlining their parts of Android bringing the kernels used in phones closer to upstream.
Oppo seems to pay developers to do the work.
Even when phones share the same soc, there are major differences in display, camera, ram, sensors, storage
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fairphone-4-Linux-Patches
They already added some patches to kernel. It could be used with linux kernel 5.16. Very good news 
And that before the phone can even be tested and gets shipped.
Looks like development will be fast
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Just curious since it’s quite an old kernel now and I’d seen articles like this one Initial Linux Kernel Patches Posted For The Fairphone 4 - Phoronix suggesting some work was started on mainlining the needed patches. Guessing that stalled at some point though?
Not sure how far along the mainlining process is, but it’s definitely not stalled.
If you have a look at the kernel mailinglist, @lucaweiss is still working toward a mainline FP4 kernel.
To be clear, the mainline/upstream kernel efforts have practically nothing to do with the LineageOS port other than targeting the same device.
Thanks, understood. I just wasn’t aware that mainlining efforts were still ongoing and that Fairphone was directly employing people to work on it. That’s fantastic!
Not wanting to go offtopic in this topic, but if you want to follow this, you can see all my patches (or rather emails) here. And I also don’t work fulltime on this, but rather one day per week that I spend on it 
Thanks will follow that. If I might ask a last question - how much progress have you made/how much is left to do? Is FP4 likely to be fully supported in mainline any time soon?
Fully supported is a difficult term, the most obvious bits missing are Bluetooth, cameras, audio, video encoding/decoding, proper USB support, all the battery things but there’s of course also a bunch of smaller things missing still that you would be able to call it “full featured”. Also note that not everything currently that works is upstream yet
Fair enough. Does Fairphone have a rough goal in mind for getting there? Appreciate you might not want to set any expectations but curious if it’s something that might happen in a year, 2 years, maybe never etc
(thanks for moving @mods)
It’s all very experimental of course, and very difficult to estimate anything given the unknown nature of many components for me. I personally want to see how far you can push mainline in 2022 (or in coming years), and this of course also enables mobile Linux distros like postmarketOS and Mobian to run on the device.
The kernel isn’t close to being mainlined yet, so no (custom) ROM is using / benefitting from this at the moment.
And this work is way more relevant for proper Linux support on the FP4, like mentioned in the post directly above yours, postmarketOS, Mobian and shells that sit on top of that, Phosh, Plasma Mobile, etc.
Mainlining would also help the updating/upgrading of much android ROM, for example LineageOS 20 on FP3+ use linux 4.9 that is deprecated and a mainlined linux kernel would prevent that problem.
See Official LineageOS 20 for FP3/FP3+