
Ask HN: Any kernel/OS vendors? - tmpfoo
There must be companies which maintain their own OS but do only minor changes which doesn&#x27;t justify keeping proper kernel&#x2F;OS team. Other than RedHat, SuSE and Canonical (which are quite costly), are there any other players which provide kernel&#x2F;OS development&#x2F;maintenance&#x2F;packaging etc? Do companies even need such services anymore?
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vetrom
So the embedded world ends needing a ton of that, but most 'big' vendors end
up having a team that builds effectively one-off products from some vendors
'board support package'/BSP. Thats also how many of the more popular SBC (aka
nanopi/orangepi/pine64) vendor images actually exist.

Its been a battle to work 'backwards' from those binary artifacts to
reproducible source builds. Thats just in the device segment.

For systems/integration vendors you'll find a Whole New World(TM) of vendors,
vendor-specific-patches, and aftermarket-vendors that take what they can buy
without a 'relationship' and try to build a product on top of that. Github is
littered with repositories of bits of knowledge around those efferts.

Once in awhile, some of these efforts get enough momentum/interest to get
pulled into a community project or if they're really lucky an upstream tree.

If you're not working with the lucky one though, you're basically working with
1000 disparate vendor source drops. Such is the embedded/specialty hardware
lanscape these days. Pretty much every hardware vendor builds to a specific
one-time deploy configuration for a customer.

There might be a market for that sort of ops integration service, but if a
startup pops up that knows how to deal with all the _details_ , they tend to
be bought out.

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n_t
Even I realized that every embedded system has its own workflow/build process
and probably some commonality can be found, despite varying underlying
hardware. Everyone is reinventing same wheel over and over. Also, since focus
of such company is either hardware or a service at higher level, embedded OS
team is never a priority. Usually I see mediocre talent and mindset of "just
glue it together and ship".

With respect to "ops integration service", do you have some examples?

