Carsten Munk has announced libhybris, a bridge for between the Bionic C library used by Android, and glibc - the C library more commonly used by Linux systems (including everything from Maemo to Ubuntu and, especially, Mer).

What this means is that binary-only hardware drivers, built on top of Bionic, will be able to run on top of a glibc system with Hybris. This will allow easier adaptation of Mer, for example, to hardware where there are Android drivers, but not free software ones.

Shown on video is a unmodified test program, built against Mesa headers and glibc, using GL shaders, fullscreen on a Qualcomm GPU on a HP Touchpad (thanks to WebOS Developer Relations for sending me one) with the GPU userland driver being utilized. Android kernel is utilized with glibc userland. Future directions can be Wayland on top of this solution, utilizing vendor RIL .so's, etc. Come to #mer on irc.freenode.net to discuss this more and get involved in testing this on various hardware and do more amazing demos than the one shown on the demo.