Samsung Galaxy Note II Source Code Released

An anonymous reader writes "Samsung has released the source code for the Samsung GALAXY Note II. This clears the way for custom ROM's for the smartphone. From the article: 'It's now been posted for the international GT-N7100 model, giving developers a peek at the 5.5-incher's inner workings and allowing them to get to work on new mods.'"

meh

[aaron552]

The exynos chipsets are a nightmare for device maintainers. The kernel source certainly helps, but the binary blobs for the device drivers, HAL, RIL, hwcomposer, etc. are still going to have to be hacked around.

Re:meh

[Andy Dodd]

Wrong. If you look at the history of CM bringups, kernel source is a small part of the equation.

I have no idea why this was able to make Slashdot. Really, since when is an Android manufacturer doing the utterly bare legal minimum of what they are required to do by the GPL newsworthy? Do we even know if they're even complying with the GPL with this release? (See below...)

As to CyanogenMod on Note 2 - It's not going to happen unless a new maintainer steps up to the plate. None of the current Exynos maintainers have any intention on purchasing any additional non-Nexus Exynos devices. We're tired of Samsung's constant GPL violations (Frequently, their source releases do NOT match that of shipped devices - for example none of the source releases for the Note 10.1 produce a viable BCM4334 driver for wi-fi.) and of their total lack of cooperation with the open source community.

Take a look at the omapzoom (TI) reference platform source. Take a look at CodeAurora (Qualcomm) reference platform source. Then take a look at the Insignal git repos, or one of Hardkernel's 2GB tarballs. Note that of the two latter examples (both for Exynos), neither has a respository with any git history. They also don't even remotely match anything that is in Samsung's shipped devices in addition to being vastly outdated. If you use the Hardkernel or Insignal hardwarecomposer source code on a device, and then completely delete hwcomposer, you will see ZERO DIFFERENCE in behavior!

Background: I am the CyanogenMod co-maintainer for the AT&T Galaxy S II (SGH-I777), International Galaxy Note (GT-N7000), and Note 10.1 (GT-N8013). The GT-N8013 is my last non-Nexus Exynos device as I'm tired of working with an undocumented platform with no source code and broken hacked-up binaries. On a regular basis, the quality of CM on Exynos devices lags months behind OMAP and Qualcomm devices due to this. I'd like to, for once, be able to actually maintain a device that's in good shape and start focusing on adding new features, instead of constantly fighting massive bugs due to the lack of documentation of Samsung's blobs. (Of which we have FAR more to deal with than OMAP or Qualcomm devices.)