After months of leaks and rumors, the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro were officially announced last month. The devices are now on sale in several countries and they even received their first set of software updates last week which addressed some early bugs and improved the front camera performance. Now in a bid to comply with the requirements of GPL v2 and help the custom development community get the ball rolling on building ROMs and kernels, OnePlus has released the kernel sources for the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro.

OnePlus 8 XDA Forums || OnePlus 8 Pro XDA Forums

OnePlus has historically provided Day 1 kernel source code release for OnePlus phones but they're admittedly a little late this time around. The kernel source code for the OnePlus 8 (code-name "instantnoodle") and OnePlus 8 Pro (code-name "instantnoodlep") have been uploaded to OnePlus's GitHub repository and interested users can download/review the code by following the link below.

OnePlus 8 & OnePlus 8 Pro kernel sources

Like all Android devices, the OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro run on a modified Linux kernel. Google takes a mainline Linux kernel release and then modifies it to support the latest Android release - they call this the "Android Common Kernel." Chipset makers then take the Android Common Kernel and modify it further to make an SoC-specific kernel. OEMs/ODMs (like OnePlus) then take the SoC-specific kernel and make further changes to support their hardware or extra vendor components - we call this a device-specific kernel. Because the Linux kernel is distributed under the GNU GPL v2 license, all entities that distribute forks of the kernel (which includes Linux kernel BLOBs shipping on commercial devices) are required to provide the source code for their kernel upon request. This is the reason why OEMs have to release kernel source, and hence why OnePlus has released the device-specific kernel for the OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro today.

XDA Review: OnePlus 8 || OnePlus 8 Pro

Historically, OnePlus phones have received great support from the custom development community. With the release of kernel sources, we hope the newest OnePlus phones will receive the same level of support from the community as well, with developers bringing a wide variety of custom ROMs, kernels and mods in the coming weeks.