Android 12—which will be out any day now—promises to bring Android closer than ever to mainline Linux by shipping Google's "Generic Kernel Image" (GKI) to end-users.

For Android, Google grabs a Linux LTS kernel and changes it into the "Android Common" kernel. This can then go to an SoC vendor like Qualcomm, which modifies it to work on a particular SoC.

Android is built on top of the Linux kernel, but it has always used a heavily-modified version with changes from OEMs, chip manufacturers like Qualcomm and MediaTek, and Google.

First up is Google, which forks the mainline kernel into "Android common" adding Android-specific changes. This is then forked by System-On-Chip ( SoC ) vendors like Qualcomm, and Samsung , to ...

Future versions of Android will be more resilient to exploits thanks to developers’ efforts to integrate the latest Linux kernel defenses into the operating system. Android’s security model ...

"Upstream Linux introduced software emulation for PAN in kernel version 4.3 for ARM and 4.10 in ARM64. We have backported both features to Android kernels starting from 3.18," notes Tolvanen.

A large number of Android devices (including all Nexus devices) running kernel versions 3.4, 3.10, and 3.14 are affected by a vulnerability that allows an app to gain root access.

Google has released the second part of the May security patch for Android, including a fix for an actively exploited Linux kernel vulnerability. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2021-22600, is a privilege ...

The vulnerability exists in all Android devices that use Linux kernel versions 3.4, 3.10, and 3.14, which includes Google's own Nexus line of smartphones.