When Sony announced their work on mainline Linux a year ago I was cautiously optimistic. Now a year on and it's great to see them collaborating with Jolla but I found this page which details current functionality on their open devices and I see that there is no mention of mainline kernel support, just old Android kernels. What concerns me is that the Xperia X has two kernels listed: 3.10 which is 3 years old and 3.18 which is 2 years old. 3.10 seems to be feature complete whilst 3.18 has a lot of hardware listed as WIP. That doesn't really inspire me with a lot of confidence in their mainline kernel support. A handful of N900 kernel hackers have achieved more than this in their spare time. Wake me up when Sony have a device which has mainline kernel support close to that of the N900.
When Sony announced their work on mainline Linux a year ago I was cautiously optimistic. Now a year on and it's great to see them collaborating with Jolla but I found this page which details current functionality on their open devices and I see that there is no mention of mainline kernel support, just old Android kernels. What concerns me is that the Xperia X has two kernels listed: 3.10 which is 3 years old and 3.18 which is 2 years old. 3.10 seems to be feature complete whilst 3.18 has a lot of hardware listed as WIP. That doesn't really inspire me with a lot of confidence in their mainline kernel support. A handful of N900 kernel hackers have achieved more than this in their spare time. Wake me up when Sony have a device which has mainline kernel support close to that of the N900.
I agree that is an old kernel. How many patches have been made since the 3.10 kernel? Is this Sony or Android still using an older kernel?
I am currently using the 4.9.4 kernel on my desktop and laptop.
quite a lot of them actually and some more will do. Have to say that SONY is one of the better OEMs in that regard.
Xperia X is one of them. All of the recent X's are. And some older Z's. Also, SONY wanted to update some other also but then google stopped that because of some BS requirements or something. It's not always OEM fault that device doesn't get the update. At the end of the day they all have to play by google rules or no google services.