Comment by chme
6 years ago
I asked myself that very question often, but the reality is that only customers that take a small number of those chips (<1.000.000) care about mainline support.
For the first tier customers they get a custom solution developed for them, and have access to all the specs under the NDA, but since that is the case, they cannot develop stuff for mainline and just produce blobs.
The i.MX8M as I understand is a chip for car navigation/entertainment systems. I wonder whether the shift towards OTA updates will encourage manufacturers to care about mainline support. Think about all the models and versions that a car company has, they’re going to have to be maintained for a decade or more, and doing that with fractured code bases and kernel patches sounds like an immense pain.
Car manufacturers seem weirdly unmoved by immense pain in software development.