# Mobian's PinePhone Kernel Support and the Loss of Cross-Distribution Collaboration

DevFeed: [Mobian's PinePhone Kernel Support and the Loss of Cross-Distribution Collaboration](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-paperweight-dilemma-34237.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2023/09/30/paperweight-dilemma/>)

Author: Mobian team

Published: 2023-10-10T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Mobian's Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/mobian-s-blog.md>)

Topics: [Linux Kernel](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/linux-kernel.md>), [Mobile](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/mobile.md>), [patches](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/patches.md>), [Hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/hardware.md>)

Tags: [community](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/community.md>), [hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hardware.md>), [linux-kernel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/linux-kernel.md>), [mobile](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/mobile.md>), [patches](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/patches.md>)

## AI overview

Mobian reflects on the difficulties of maintaining support for the original PinePhone. The article argues that separate kernel trees and reduced cross-distribution collaboration left the community dependent on a small number of maintainers and created a single point of failure.

## Source excerpt

Mobian started as a hobby project, triggered by the excitement of finally being able to hack one's mobile phone at will. It is fair to say that the device that made it possible back then was the original PinePhone. However, after running once again into the same difficulties we experienced over and over, we're wondering whether maintaining support for this device is still worth the effort... Of kernels and men In the beginning, the mobile Linux world was full of happy people, hacking on many different aspects of the system in a very disorganized but fruitful way, one of those aspects being the Linux kernel. Back then there was a single reference source tree, maintained under the PINE64 umbrella (but still being a community effort, no one being funded in any way to work on this kernel). Things were obviously not ideal, however many talented people were talking to each other, trying to improve hardware support and fix the many bugs we were experiencing at this point. Until, I don't quite remember how, it all turned into a race, in which the goal was to have better (or at least identical) support than the neighbouring projects. In particular, one very skilled developer set to solve many of the problems we had back then, and published their work as a separate repo. Several mobile distributions quickly switched to this kernel, effectively abandoning the shared kernel source we were all using until then. This resulted in a loss of interest and, ultimately, collaboration on the kernel ceased: some ended up using megi's kernel directly, while Mobian forked the "Pine64" one and cherry-picked interesting patches from megi's tree, but it all happened without further cross-distro discussions. Our single reference tree was then left rotting (the last kernel compatible with the PinePhone being based on 5.9, which was released nearly 3 years ago!) and unmaintained since then. A single point of failure The end result can be summed up as follows: those relying on megi's kernel depend