 My name is Tom Gaul, I'm the director of the Lenaro MOBAG group and I'd like to introduce Emmett Pundir and specifically we're like to just talk a little bit about a project involving Android Common Kernel and the mainline tracking tree. You've both been at Lenaro for a long time, right? Yes. You've got more than five-year badge or? Yeah, it's been six years for me. Six years, yeah. And so I was here before the Lenaro even started. Oh, nice. It was part of the founding. And you work in some Android stuff? I work on Android Common Kernels. Lately I've been involved with Android Mainline Tracking Tree. So the people who don't know what Android Mainline Tracking Tree is, it's the Android patch set which gets repaced on top of Linux Master. So it tracks upstream development. So it tracks upstream Linux kernel? It puts it so that your work makes the Android kernel newer? Yes, so the official Android Common Kernels, they track LTS trees, long-term stable trees. And Android Mainline Tracking Tree tracks upstream development tree, which is Linux Master. For example, right now Android Mainline Tracking Tree is on 4.15. And so basically you help Android device makers get 4.15 more easily? Yes, it's like a run up to the next LTS. All the Android vendors, they choose LTS as their product kernels. LTS-based Android Common Kernels as their base kernel for their next products. For example, right now it's Android 4.14. Going forward it could be Android 4.18, 4.19. So the exercise which we are doing right now is that it's like a preview to the next LTS. Was that like a big deal, like six months ago when you were talking about Leonardo's going to help keep the Android kernel updates and stuff more updated? Is it related to that? So what's kind of transpired here is this is a tree that Lunaro was maintaining, and particularly Amit was maintaining, that was within Lunaro's get trees as opposed to the public Android Common Kernel tree. So this is a tree which has moved from Lunaro's trees into the Android Common Kernel as part of the AOSP project. So you're moving all the Linux kernel stuff, helping the Android community? It was just the location of the tree that changed. And really the big thing that this tree does for not only us, our members and the world at large is it can serve as an early reference for those companies that are working within the Android space to get a very cutting edge kernel and see, you know, and essentially use that for their own development. We also use it as an early warning system so that if the Linux kernel development community is making some changes that would impact the Android community, this is where we see those things in conflicting patches or suddenly design changes. We have detected ABI breakages in the past and we reported it upstream and got it fixed. Is it possible that some crazy cool Android device maker wants to ship a product that just has the latest kernel? It doesn't matter if it's long-term support or not. Is that possible? Is that what they would do? It is possible, but no one wants to do that. Yeah, it probably wouldn't make any sense. Because the thing is when you ultimately want to ship a product being on top of an LTS kernel, meaning long-term support, your device is probably going to be around for, you know, hopefully as many years as possible. So staying in sync with a long-term support kernel is to your advantage to get a continual fixed stream coming in, be it functionality fixes or security fixes, more importantly. And since the LTS community, the long-term support community, does not, by policy, call out what our security fix is, it's important to track to LTS. So Android is the biggest Linux destroyer in the world, so what you're doing is very important, right? I hope so. Yeah, yeah. So what is the latest LTS release? It's 4.14. And when is the next one? Who knows? Approximately maybe at the end of this year. It's always something that, you know, the community at large and Greg and, you know, others, this is, you know, there is an exact date that's ever set in stone. What you did decide that is a lot based on what you're doing. So they're checking that Android is good, everything is okay? No. No? No. So we are the ones who are forward-porting Android patchset on LTS or, you know, Linux master. Obscure development has nothing to do with whatever is in the Android common kernel. All right. So when did you start doing what you're doing right now? Oh, we have been doing it for a long time now. John Sturz, I think, started it from 3.14 kernel. Five years ago or something? Yeah, I guess so, yeah. Could be as far back as that. It's been a while. It's been a while. It's been a while. But how's it different now compared to back then? Is it more busy now? There's many more things to check. We have got more users now. Earlier it was only for internal development and internal consumption. But now since we are doing it as part of AOSP Android mainline tracking tree. So it's getting used more. It's getting... And there aren't as many patches that you have to rebase from version to version. That's been going down as well. And you put all the Android optimizations into Android now? Or by now? Yeah. The Linux platform optimization. So they all... Like what's next? No, this isn't really for that particular purpose. I mean, I suppose if you had a kernel optimization that would be appropriate. But that would go through the mainline kernel community. That's not something that we would introduce through this particular project. All right. So are you going to be busy in the next few months? Yeah. I'll be doing this... Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. More and more stuff. And so, for example, some of the people who can watch you do is like Google or device makers or... So right now we are doing it as a Google side project. Yeah.