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Mishaal Rahman @MishaalRahman@androiddev.social
3y
Some BIG news dropped this week that could have a major impact on Android security: The LTS (long-term support) period for the Linux kernel is being cut down from 6 years to 2 years.

Ron Amadeo has a good summary of the situation on ArsTechnica: arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/linux-gives-up-on-6-year-lts-thats-fine-for-pcs-bad-for-android/

(Instead of maintaining 6 different LTS versions for 6 years each, I wonder why the number of supported LTS versions wasn't just reduced down to, like, 3?)
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Mishaal Rahman @MishaalRahman@androiddev.social
3y
Google never publicly announced this, but a little fun fact: Since 2021, Google has actually required that Android devices perform bi-yearly LTS (minor) updates for the first 2 years after the release of the OS. Afterwards, they have to perform a yearly LTS update while the OS version is still in Google's support window.

You can sometimes see this in the Android Security Bulletin, where a "minimum kernel version" is listed for a particular Android OS version.
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Jeder neocat_floof_googly_woozy neocat_flag_agender 🔜 eth0 @jeder@miau.jeder.pl
3y
@MishaalRahman soooo, why's mine stuck on 5.4 even though it's on 13 already?
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Jeder neocat_floof_googly_woozy neocat_flag_agender 🔜 eth0 @jeder@miau.jeder.pl
3y
@MishaalRahman i wish oems did their job properly for once
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