Comment by shoaibmerchant
7 hours ago
Creator here, thanks for highlighting this.
We are currently following the NXP IMX downstream kernel, that is why you can check the 'imx-' prefix on our branch, their releases follow 6 months after the LTS release. NXP IMX 6.18 will release roughly by end of March, when it does you will see us updating to 6.18 as well. By the time we ship, we mostly likely will be shipping 6.18.
Now we do intend to upstream, we've even got mainline u-boot to start working with the device albeit the display. We were waiting for the hardware configuration to be stabilized before we submit the device trees and start actively working on mainline support. It won't happen overnight but you will see our documentation clearly defining how far we are from the mainline. Also to add here, compared to other SOCs, NXP already has very good mainline support.
Thanks for this. When I first saw this I was expecting to find it was a dead-end Chinese SoM with an ancient kernel - so the fact it's an iMX (which has great support from NXP) is great.
I had a poke around the u-boot and linux repos they share, and it looks like the changes from mainline are pretty minimal - mostly related to device trees and configuration. That's to be expected for any custom board.
Obviously if the company died before this stuff was mainlined, then someone would need to maintain it. But from what I've seen everything you'd need is out there already.