OMAP Kernel Overivew

Migration to open source kenel
TI is migrating its OMAP Linux offering to the linux-omap kernel. This Linux kernel project has had an active open source community for several years, and is a downstream of the Linux mainline kernel. That way, TI can fully leverage the existing open source communities around the Linux kernel, and ensure that OMAP platform is fully supported in the mainline kernel. This is an advantage for both TI and TI's customers. As a consequence OMAP3 and OMAP4 support will be soon fully enabled in the mainline Linux kernel releases.

There are some very important notes regarding this migration that need to be understood by all Linux OMAP stakeholders:


 * TI is no longer developing a custom linux kernel for OMAP. The so-called omapzoom kernel that is hosted here is deprecated and no longer maintained. It was used in previous TI Android releases. This kernel was customized by TI and was following a distinct development path from the community-supported linux-omap kernel.


 * TI software offering is now based on the open source community linux OMAP kernel. TI is committed to support the open source community linux-omap kernel. This kernel is hosted here. This tree is maintained by Tony Lindgren, Kevin Hilman and Paul Walmsley and the following mailing list can be used to submit/get patches [mailto:linux-omap@vger.kernel.org linux-omap@vger.kernel.org]. This tree is always following Linus Torvalds official Linux releases.


 * TI software development teams will submit their changes (bug fixes, new features, ... ) to the open source community: linux-omap for core platform, but also linux-usb or linux-audio, ...


 * Since TI is making Linux kernel releases at its own rate, and since it does not follow mainstream releases rate but rather customers requests, TI has created integration trees for OMAP3 and OMAP4 product lines. These trees are used to host TI Linux kernel software releases.