14 DAY TRIAL // Mountain View-based company Google is already known to have a thing about naming various Android releases as sweets, and we have already seen versions of the platform delivered on the market in the form of Cupcake, Donut or Eclair, but there are more to come, it seems. There are at least two new flavors of the operating system that will arrive in the foreseeable future, and now we learn that they will come as Froyo and Gingerbread.
Most owners of an Android-based mobile phone out there are certainly eagerly waiting for new flavors of Google's operating system to arrive on the market, especially since a nice range of improvements, fixes and new features have been introduced with each of the already delivered updates. And it seems that the next iterations of the mobile client will also include enhancements, through a series of patches on top of Linux, as a recent post on lwn.net shows:
These patches fall roughly into four buckets: - random bugfixes (these are usually pretty easy to submit upstream) - generic Android related drivers that are standalone (lowmemorykiller, binder, ashmem, logger, etc): These pieces are used by the Android userspace, but not other kernel drivers. - generic Android related drivers that add new infrastructure. Wakelocks are pretty much the only significant piece here. They are depended on my peripheral drivers, but that can be conditionalized. - support for new SoCs (msm7k, msm8k, etc) and boards/devices (G1, myTouch, NexusOne, Droid, etc) - they live under Arch/arm/mach-*/... and don't have many special dependencies other than wakelocks (which can be conditionalized)
All in all, the main idea is that Google seems set to remain faithful to its habit of naming Android releases after sweets, and Froyo and Gingerbread are up next in the roadmap. What exactly these future iterations of the mobile operating system will bring to users still remains to be seen, though it might not be too long before we learn that the first of them is on the verge of being released, so stay tuned.