The Failed OUYA Game Console Seeing Work For Mainline Linux Kernel Support

It's been eight years already since the launch of the OUYA game console built atop Android and initially driven up by hype as a new low-cost gaming platform only to turn out to be a commercial failure. Razer bought out OUYA's software assets in 2015 and last year finally shutdown all of the console services. But if you still have the OUYA hardware it soon may start running off the mainline Linux kernel.

As we approach the end of 2020, there is an independent developer that's been working to mainline Linux kernel support for the OUYA game console. With OUYA being built atop the NVIDIA Tegra 3 SoC, the upstreaming effort isn't too involved but principally adding the appropriate Device Tree bits for the kernel. But with the console just having the Tegra 3 with quad-core Cortex-A9 processor, 1GB of RAM, and 8~16GB of internal memory, the hardware isn't all that interesting in 2020.

Previously there has been Ubuntu and Debian among other Linux distributions bootstrapped for OUYA by independent developers albeit didn't spark too much interest. But with hopes of improving the situation for those wanting to run Linux on the console now that Razer killed off the OUYA game services support in 2019, Peter Geis has been working on the upstream kernel patches.

Sent out today were the latest patches for the OUYA game console kernel support. The code hasn't been queued in the ARM platform "-next" tree yet but we'll see if it makes it into a forthcoming mainline kernel.