It’s been very slow around here lately. Being busy with work and holidays hurts productivity. However, I’m starting to get back into the groove.
Gingerbread is proving to be a beast to port. A lot has changed from Froyo and we’ll be left making square pegs fit in round holes. As usual, all old platforms have been abandoned, except for the venerable Nexus One of course. This makes it somewhat annoying to get all the older hardware working as it did in older versions.
Here’s an incomplete list of things which have broken in the upgrade to Gingerbread:
- Severe drop in 2D graphics performance (a fix is in progress, pending testing and commit to our frameworks/base fork)
- Existing sensors library is incompatible, so the accelerometer is not working
- Location services crash the system during initialization (bootloop); additionally, removing Location provider causes Browser to crash at Google home page
- Trying to activate bluetooth crashes the system
- SD card is not visible (as mounted) in Android
- Screen backlight stays on when it should sleep (display turns black)
- Device hangs in sleep mode
There are other issues here and there that aren’t important or difficult enough to list here, or that I haven’t found yet. Also important to note is that I’ve been testing exclusively on a Raphael (ATT Fuze) so any issues with other platforms (Rhodium in particular) may not be found by me.
I’ll be working actively on these issues in the immediate future. Needless to say, the Gingerbread release is probably a long way off. There is a lot of work to be done, and unfortunately Gingerbread is mostly a solo effort by myself at the moment. If you’d like to help out, or if you know someone who can help, please drop by our IRC channel and join the development discussion. We need all the help we can get.
Thanks!