It appears that the Nexus 10 is receiving some attention with regards to its compatability with AOSP after it was revealed that the binaries for the GPU have not been included in the Google Developers page, meaning that building Android 4.3 for the device from AOSP is not possible at the moment.
After a developer in the Google Developers Groups advised JBQ about issues building Android 4.3 using the existing drivers and queried if newer ones were needed about the Graphics binaries for Android 4.3, he replied –
Nexus 10 is not supported in AOSP as of 4.3. You need to use 4.2.2.
When asked to clarify if the Nexus 10 would be supported in AOSP for releases for Android 4.3 and beyond, he then explained –
Getting a license would be a prerequisite, but it might not be the only factor. Specifically, if such a license doesn’t apply to all the necessary files, or if it only applies to 4.3 but not subsequent releases, it’s not clear that Nexus 10 would be considered supported again.
Android Police point out that the binaries for the Mali T604 GPU in the Nexus 10 for Android 4.2.2 are available to download on the same page, so it’s difficult to understand what exactly is going on here.
When the Android 4.2 update was pushed to AOSP, Jean-Baptiste Queru, the current – for now – head of the Android Open Source Project(AOSP) is on record as saying
Nexus 10 is now the best choice for AOSP work on 4.2. Everything except the GPU code is Open Source, and the only proprietary binaries besides the GPU libraries are firmware files that get loaded into the various peripheral chips. No flagship device so far has been so open, and no flagship device so far has had that level of AOSP support at launch.
And it seems that the GPU is again the sticking point. This could also be another part of the reason that JBQ has resigned from the AOSP project.
Hopefully we see this issue resolved quickly, but it’s likely that lawyers will be involved at some stage in the back end. As end users though, this only affects the building of AOSP based ROMs, luckily for now the Android 4.3 Factory image is still available. But we await further developments.
