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.
Also, TI and Freescale are both good with providing official driver source code of decent quality. Even Broadcom contributed a lot of drivers upstream.