Lineage 23 - Primetime Release

[ronnz98]

Lineage 23 has now been officially announced:

Changelog 30 - Sleek Sixteen, Streamlined Suite, Future Flow

[Doppel-D]

Some bad news quoted…

TL;DR:

• Google no longer pushes monthly tags and patches to AOSP; and most fixes/security patches are now pushed quarterly, if at all.
• Security patch levels may occasionally lag: we only increment them once all patches are public.
• LineageOS 23.0 is based on Android 16 “QPR0” because QPR1’s source isn’t public yet.
  • Because of this some headline features (like Material 3 Expressive) will come later, once sources drop.
• Pixel support continues, but with reduced source access, they’re no longer guaranteed, let alone on day one.

Legacy Devices

The bad news extends a bit further here, though it’s less surprising than the earlier sections.

Google’s increased reliance on newer eBPF features has made supporting devices with older Linux kernels increasingly difficult. Android 16 “QPR0” “requires Linux 5.4 and above, and at the time of writing, the necessary features have only been properly backported as far back as 4.14.

Unfortunately, LineageOS 22.2 still supports many devices running 4.4 and 4.9. As of now, no complete backports of the required features exist for these kernels. The silver lining is that, unlike the massive device loss we saw moving off LineageOS 18.1, these versions could be salvaged if someone were to take on the work of adapting the backports. If you do succeed, please reach out to devrel(at)lineageos.org, we’d be happy to review it!

We’re currently targeting only shipping kernels that have 1:1 eBPF backports to make them feature equivalent to Linux 5.4 from here on out to avoid compatibility issues.

[tcecyk]

the mainline targets are to me the most interesting news, for much more pressings reasons - but also for old devices to get current eBPF as a drive-by. Makes for synergies with the rest of mobile linux. Anticipating a sdm845 / sm7150 based build with a mainline kernel.

Also: more commonization of SoC kernels and shims - helps the effort required to maintain or bringup.

Happy about the GSI and qemu items, lowering the bar to entry and for it to garner contributions at Lineage. They did shy away from releasing an “official” gsi though.

The OTA verifier is a nice touch when in years you want to verify images not obtained from Lineage.

From the UI side the TV Launcher is the most interesting component.

Not part of this release: Android Verified Developer changes to package manager will be made public with Android 16 QPR1 (then Lineage 23.1) later this year, looking forward to how this will be handled.