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Re: [04/05] Embedded with systemd: systemd and kernel upgrades



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On Mon, 17/11/14, Jean-Christian de Rivaz <jc@eclis.ch> wrote:
> If you take the risk to rely exclusively on a vendor BSP, take your responsibility and don't blame others for your poor choice. Most today SoC vendors  understand that there must upload there patches to mainline

Keep in mind that the individual you are addressing may not even be from the company who made the SoC choice, let alone be the person responsible. In my case for example, one of the targets I support is a niche-market, low-volume, integrated system built by a 3rd-party where the SoC has been "accidentally" included into a system because it happened to be attached to the one-of-a-kind hardware which made the system viable in the first place. No doubt their engineers chose diligently for power consumption, environmental ratings, board layout constraints and supply chain availability but as the SoC makes up <1% of the design effort I'd say mainline linux kernel support somehow slipped their initial selection criteria.
 
>  kernel and do it routinely. This means that while some vendors still offer BSP (because there have clients asking for it), last mainline  kernel run as well just fine on there SoC.

But this is only very recently the case, no? TI for example only *just* finally achieved mainline kernel support for a few SoC models in the Sitara family beginning 8 months ago. They are shipping a lot more SoC variants stuck on kernel 2.6, 3.0 and 3.2 than they have in mainline.

"ARM CPU architecture support" != "SoC" support. I have personally tried to port our SoC vendor's crappy 3.0 kernel up as far as I can; I can get as far as kernel 3.5 where its proprietarity peripheral bus' magic, undocumented timing/DMA/interrupt quirks really start to fall apart (I do not have deep enough knowledge of the chip or these parts of the Linux kernel to complete the work in a timely manner).

> Fell free to try it all. I have do that since many years and found that  the Jessie armhf port is actually vastly superior to anything out there.
 
Agreed :-)

--
Paul


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