This was a marketing post, not a technical one. Unless we see any git branches or ROM teardown we won’t know what they were doing. I highly doubt that they did any kernel patches though.
Comment on Rabbit R1 is Just an Android App
infeeeee@lemm.ee 8 months agoThey wrote “lower level firmware modifications”, AOSP runs on Linux kernel, and firmware modifications usually means they modified the Linux kernel. This device seems like a regular Android phone, and afaik this rules apply to all Android phones, that’s why Android rom cooking can exist.
woodgen@lemm.ee 8 months ago
jj4211@lemmy.world 8 months ago
They may be compelled to release any driver code associated, however firmware is not covered by relation to kernel. Linux runs on mostly proprietary firmware. The “linux-firmware” package in many distributions that contains hot plug firmware is mostly proprietary blobs.
That said I doubt they had much significant firmware work, it may just be logo and some tweaked configuration from their SoC vendor. They likely had to modify AOSP a bit more to allow their launcher unfettered access to the device in ways not modeled by standard AOSP, but that’s user space that isn’t GPL.