31–37 of 37 posts
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Drivers != Linux drivers. Also, TI and Freescale are both good with providing official driver source code of decent quality. Even Broadcom contributed a lot of drivers upstream.
Heads up, Freescale is part of NXP Semiconductors now.
Honest question: Can somebody explain to me why I would want to get this instead of a Raspberry Pi or a Beagle Bone?
Gigabit Ethernet is interesting to me, I've ended up using rather more expensive devices than raspberry Pis because their network performance is poor (particularly on the Pi as the Ethernet is attached via USB).
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I'd love to know of SoC vendor that does. Intel and Wolfson are the only chip vendor that delivers above and beyond for Linux drivers that come to mind. Everything else is hack city in proprietary kernel forks that never see the light of mainline.
Drivers != Linux drivers. Also, TI and Freescale are both good with providing official driver source code of decent quality. Even Broadcom contributed a lot of drivers upstream.
Can you elaborate on this? In theory they should be equal and the less userspace supporting tools for hardware the better.
I guess I don't count userspace "drivers" as real drivers. Almost every time I've seen them they are epic hacks. Other times they are evading the GPL.
> Also, TI and Freescale are both good with providing official driver source code of decent quality. Even Broadcom contributed a lot of drivers upstream.
Come on now. I've worked on integrating Qualcomm, TI and Broadcom SoCs in to products.
TI does quite a bit better then most, but I'd love to understand why an old chip that's built in to tons of industrial products like the AM3359 still has a kernel fork for it's advance features like the PRUSS. I worked on a project I first built 6 years ago on that platform and was appalled that they still hadn't managed to mainline the code.
I haven't used the iMX directly, but I get the impression Freescale/NXP is similar to TI: drivers and datasheets are available, but the corporate will to merge to mainline isn't. I hope Qualcomm doesn't crush this. Is there any good reason my 2016 Google Pixel smartphone is running kernel 3.18? Ask Qualcomm.
Broadcom, you have got to be kidding me? The Raspberry PI is treated as a continuous PR vehicle, no real reference manuals or proper datasheets to speak of for the public. Not to mention their "support" for their WiFi and Bluetooth drivers requires ripping up Windows drivers to extract firmware updates to try and make them half work on Linux.
IMO it's a mistake to develop a board that's not capable of running 64 bit ARM code these days. While you might not need the address space capabilities, aarch64 standardizes a lot of things that would otherwise bite you in the ass if you develop software that needs to run on several flavors of ARM. I.e. all 64 bit ARMs have NEON and hard float. And not just any NEON, but NEON specific to 64 bit ARM, with newer instru…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Drivers != Linux drivers. Also, TI and Freescale are both good with providing official driver source code of decent quality. Even Broadcom contributed a lot of drivers upstream.
> Drivers != Linux drivers. Can you elaborate on this? In theory they should be equal and the less userspace supporting tools for hardware the better. I guess I don't count userspace "drivers" as real drivers. Almost every time I've seen them they are epic hacks. Other times they are evading the GPL. > Also, TI and Freescale are both good with providing official driver source code of decent quality. Even Broadcom con…
> Can you elaborate on this?
There are other OS choices out in the world which sometimes get support -- particularly in this quasi-embedded space.
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I had the same issue (no ARM+USB3+gigabit boards) so I had to build a board that had all of that plus mSata and minipcie.
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