5 ms·

A thousand times this. I'm tired of having to reverse engineer the hardware I bought because the SoC vendor sits on their manuals and datasheets like a dragon o

A thousand times this. I'm tired of having to reverse engineer the hardware I bought because the SoC vendor sits on their manuals and datasheets like a dragon on a pile of gold. Even if you are making your own SBCs and offering to write the drivers you run against walls. Apparently many embedded vendors don't want their stuff to be used or to work properly.

amelius 4y ago
> Apparently many embedded vendors don't want their stuff to be used or to work properly. Can someone please organize an AMA for each of these vendors' product managers? I have the feeling they live in a different world and it could result in interesting discussions.
- ilyt 4y ago
  From what I've gathered it's the clowns in suits thinking that putting drivers in kernel instead of behind NDA is some kind of "competitive advantage". Other reason is that kernel requires some minimal level of code quality and many of the closed source ones are basically "the minimum to make the customer use case work" Yet another reason is just not wanting to bother with more than bare minimum for chip that will be in market few years and replaced with something newer
  - swinglock 4y ago
    Ironically this seemingly widespread issue makes the opposite even more true. That is, working correctly with Linux without patches would be a differentiator and a competitive advantage.
  - fexecve 4y ago
    > Other reason is that kernel requires some minimal level of code quality and many of the closed source ones are basically "the minimum to make the customer use case work" I think this is the real, actual reason. Having worked in embedded for a long time, the coding horrors are endless and routine. There's no way 99.99% of embedded software would ever pass the kernel's strict code quality standards. It's easier to just ship a "bastardized" (as others here are calling it) patched kernel.

amelius 4y ago

> Apparently many embedded vendors don't want their stuff to be used or to work properly. Can someone please organize an AMA for each of these vendors' product managers? I have the feeling they live in a different world and it could result in interesting discussions.

ilyt 4y ago
From what I've gathered it's the clowns in suits thinking that putting drivers in kernel instead of behind NDA is some kind of "competitive advantage". Other reason is that kernel requires some minimal level of code quality and many of the closed source ones are basically "the minimum to make the customer use case work" Yet another reason is just not wanting to bother with more than bare minimum for chip that will be in market few years and replaced with something newer
- swinglock 4y ago
  Ironically this seemingly widespread issue makes the opposite even more true. That is, working correctly with Linux without patches would be a differentiator and a competitive advantage.
- fexecve 4y ago
  > Other reason is that kernel requires some minimal level of code quality and many of the closed source ones are basically "the minimum to make the customer use case work" I think this is the real, actual reason. Having worked in embedded for a long time, the coding horrors are endless and routine. There's no way 99.99% of embedded software would ever pass the kernel's strict code quality standards. It's easier to just ship a "bastardized" (as others here are calling it) patched kernel.