Jolla Ports Wayland To Android GPU Drivers 90
An anonymous reader writes "A Jolla Sailfish OS engineer has ported Wayland to run on Android GPU drivers. The implementation uses libhybis with the Android driver so that the rest of the operating system can be a conventional glibc-based Linux operating system, such as Mer / Sailfish OS. The code is to be LGPL licensed. The reported reasoning for making Wayland support Android GPU drivers was difficulty in ODM vendors not wishing to offer driver support for platforms aside from Android."
It's even simpler than that (Score:5, Insightful)
The reported reasoning for making Wayland support Android GPU drivers was difficulty in ODM vendors not wishing to offer driver support for platforms aside from Android.
ODMs don't know how to write software, so you're better off not asking them to; the result would just be garbage anyway. All the GPU drivers are actually written by the GPU IP vendors (Qualcomm, Imagination, ARM, etc.) and they only provide Android drivers. You could try to pay them to write KMS/DRM drivers, but they'd probably quote you a price in the millions which minority platform wannabes like Jolla could not afford anyway.
Re:Eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, just from the summary it says they ported Wayland to run on Android GPU drivers, so I assume that the point is not to run Wayland on Android but to use Android's GPU drivers for Sailfish OS. That would make sense because trying to persuade hardware vendors to make a whole new driver branch for a yet-unproven OS is not something most developers would look forward to. At least that's just my impression - I'm off now to go read the fine article.