Google announced last year that the venerable Galaxy Nexus would not be getting any of that sweet, sweet KitKat action. Well, not officially anyway. Owners were not pleased, but they couldn't properly flood the internet with complaints because their phones were already dead. There have been a few KitKat ROMs that work well enough, but now some developers have created a kernel and GPU driver combo that could keep this device chugging along through the L release.

The Gnex is far from the fastest device these days, but it should still have enough horsepower to run KitKat, so why the lack of updates? It probably has a lot to do with the end of TI's consumer OMAP chips. The Gnex runs an OMAP 4, which is no longer supported with binaries from TI. You can't just throw together hardware drivers like you can a ROM.

The breakthrough came in July when Ziyan from XDA created a kernel for the Gnex that could run newer GPU drivers. Now fellow XDA-er MWisBest has updated the GPU drivers for the TI chip powering the Galaxy Nexus. The result is a KitKat ROM that works better than previous ports, and the support necessary to get Android L running on the Gnex when the time comes. The so-called "ForkMyLife" ROM can be downloaded for both the LTE and GSM variants of the device, but keep in mind it's still a beta.

[XDA]