I've used this kernel on some products and would recommend staying away when possible because you're kind of stuck in a corner wrt to feature and security updat

I've used this kernel on some products and would recommend staying away when possible because you're kind of stuck in a corner wrt to feature and security updates. Most of Xilinx's SoCs are very close to working on mainline kernels out of the box. You'll need to build/patch some advanced FPGA features, but with nothing more then a kernel config you'll have a functioning Linux system. IMHO, putting in the work to use a mainline kernel (and Yocto in place of petalinux) is well worth it in the long run for real products. Xilinx is to be commended for their efforts to mainline many features. Petalinux and linux-xlnx are ultimately early dev and platform demonstration tools. They provide many features, but are lacking polish and stability needed for real products.