Intel Delivers Innovations Atop Google's Android

Intel has released their own spin of Google's Android operating system with some features not yet found in the upstream open-source Android project.

For the past half-year Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers have been working on Android-IA, their project that optimizes the AOSP (Android Open-Source Project) code for Intel hardware.

Released yesterday by Intel developers was Android-4.2.2_r1-ia0. Among the new features to this Intel-optimized Android version, which is based upon upstream Google Android 4.2.2, include:

- UEFI boot support. Gummiboot is also now used as the Android-IA bootloader instead of syslinux.

- Android-IA is now powered by the Linux 3.8 kernel.

- There's now an interactive installer and support for installing Android-IA alongside Microsoft Windows 8 with dual-boot support.

- Upstream Mesa has been pulled into Android-IA, which is particularly important since Intel OTC wants a good Android experience when using their open-source Intel Mesa Linux driver.

- Support for signed kernel modules can be found within Android-IA.

- A unified installer for all platforms (excluding the except Samsung XE700t).

Matt Gumbel, a Phoronix fan and one of the Intel OTC developers responsible for Android-IA, wrote in to additionally say, "We've been putting out releases for about 6 months now and we are starting to hit our stride. We just released a particularly cool feature: our installer is now capable of installing Android-IA side-by-side with a pre-existing Win8 installation. We also offer a few other features not yet available from AOSP: automatic kernel module loading (i.e. modprobe for Android), a flexible installer (Iago) for install-time configuration of the Android installation, UEFI boot using the Gummiboot bootloader, Ethernet network support, scalable HALs, userspace Fastboot, and others."

More information on Android-IA can be found at the 01.org project page.