HTC Releases the Kernel Source for the HTC U11

When an OEM ships a device running on Android, the GPLv2 license requires them to provide the kernel source code as the underlying kernel is based off of the Linux kernel. While some companies do so swiftly and in a good fashion, some take extra time to release a tarball of the source (although, there are also companies that seem to not care about abiding by the GPL licensing at all). Fortunately, HTC is not one of those companies. The company has just released the kernel source for the HTC U11.

HTC announced its U11 flagship almost a month ago. The device is powered by the Snapdragon 835 SoC and features 4GBs of RAM, 64GBs of internal storage and Android 7.1 Nougat on board. HTC released a few variants of the phone and has now provided the kernel source for five of them. On the HTCdev page, you can find the source for the European variant of the phone. There are also Vodafone variants for Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Switzerland. There are some differences in the file description, so if you are planning on doing kernel development, pay attention to which file are you downloading.

Unfortunately, HTC does not release a commit history, which makes the source really hard to work on. The company should take after Sony as an example in this regard. The Japanese OEM is excellent at maintaining the kernel source for its devices and even releases a full commit history instead of just a tarball.

Released kernel source will help developers to create custom kernels and ROMs, especially those based off of AOSP. We should expect to see some AOSP-based projects coming to the HTC U11 variants pretty soon, though this of course depends entirely on the efforts of developers. We should only keep our fingers crossed for HTC to maintain their sources for future Android version updates without any hiccups. It should be noted that the company has had some problems with this in the past, though.

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Get the kernel source for the HTC U11 Check out the HTC U11 XDA forum

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