[EVO 4G Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] ittsmith:
I have a general IT background of 10+ years with basic scripting skills so understand on a general level about drivers but I have been reading for several months trying to understand the EXACT nature of the problem for why i still don't see a ICS rom for the evo4g with working (or semi-working) wimaxx.

Can someone please educate me? Here is my version....

Sprint has retired the evo4g via end of life decision process and so does not have a formal team working on an ICS build of any kind for my phone. I don't agree with this decision, but i understand why Sprint is not providing me with one.

Because Sprint has retired the phone, HTC is not doing any development for the phone and so THEY aren't providing me with any drivers. I'm not sure who of these two made the business decision, Sprint or HTC, probably HTC. Either way, no formal support from either of them. I don't agree, but accept that.

As for developers coming up with their own, this is where I'm expecting magic and so instead of just crying "where are my drivers, where is my rom" i am attempting to learn why they aren't here and am requesting an education on the subject.

From my understanding, AOSP is Googles contribution for free to the world. This is a great operating system for running phones for a variety of reasons. From there, manufacturers take the basic kernel and modify it to work with their equipment. This is where it gets a bit confusing for me.

I think that the manufacturers do two things. One, is that they work with chip manufacturers to obtain proprietary drivers for specific chipsets that integrate into the basic kernel. Two is that phone manufacturers ALSO modify the kernel so as to make a proprietary version of the kernel. So HTC made a propritary version of the kernel and incorporated SENSE (among other things) into that proprietary kernel, and hooked up proprietary drivers that may or may not work with the AOSP kernel to provide services such as video and wimax and sound etc.

I know teamwin some how reverse engineered or manufactured a wimax driver for gingerbread such that the wimax driver was available for the AOSP Gingerbread kernel, but teamwin or nobody else has done that such that a wimax driver is available for the AOSP ICS kernel

I know that HTC has wimax working on some of its phones that have ICS via threads that talk about it being leaked (i.e Nexxus 4g).

So here are some questions... I suspect none of them are accurately asked.

Version1

Does AOSP ICS kernel have the ability to have a wimaxx driver built/interfaced into it?

If so, is it HTC that technically owns this driver or another specific company?

Version2

If AOSP ICS kernel does not, does that mean we currently need both a specific evo4g ICS kernel AND the wimax driver built?

Or are either of these easy to build and we just need one part of them built...meaning the wimax driver is out in the world for developers now and all that needs to happens is for someone to put some "hooks" into a new evo4g kernel such that they would work with the driver.

I apologize in advance if i broke some posting rules. I can't post in developement section yet so i placed in q/a where it says "any question". I did some basic research on the subject so i'm not just whining i don't have my driver. I am trying to get at the specific thing that needs to happen for my evo4g rom to have wimax working on ICS.

My theory is "HTC owns the wimax driver for ICS but won't release the source code as they only want to bring certain wimax devices into the ICS generation. It is proprietary to a specific kernel so if it was released, it would not instantly work with the AOSP kernel and other kernels. It would still need further development (but on which end???). It is illegal and difficult for someone to reverse engineer this ICS WIMAXX driver. It is legal, but still difficult for someone to create a generic ICS WIMAXX driver. Since both are difficult they will not happen soon."

Thanks for your thoughts in advance.