And this is the situation with damn near every ARM board you can buy! It's depressing. I finally had to give up on my Efika MX smartbook because they never got past a 2.6 kernel, which IIRC eventually meant I couldn't upgrade libc past a certain point, which meant I couldn't upgrade anything else.
Yes it is and it is terrible. The lack of upstreaming also makes things like applying the PREEMPT_RT patches much more difficult than it should be. You might be stuck at a version of the kernel where PREEMPT_RT was never released, not to mention you will be missing the PREEMPT_RT changes in the custom code.
