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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

RPi's niche is really as an SBC supported by mainline Linux and a giant community. That's why it had supply shortages - that's a huge value add to the electronics industry and the money was too good to resist pivoting to commercial users over education and hobbyists. Grabbing an Altium/KiCad/etc footprint and slapping a compute module on a board while prototyping with a Pi is still the fastest way to go to market with a well supported Linux CPU. All the other manufacturers have really really shitty BSPs in comparison, even if you're just offloading everything realtime to an MCU.

ESP32/ESPHome may have taken over the lower end with its easy config but there's still no real Pi competitor. A decade after the first RPi release, I still dread using any other platform when I have to design a board that requires more compute than an ESP32.

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> All the other manufacturers have really really shitty BSPs in comparison, even if you're just offloading everything realtime to an MCU.

The irony here is that other SOC/SBC makers are focused more on throwing a barely stable design onto AliExpress for $20 than investing in good upstream support that would allow them to charge a premium.

Raspberry Pi wasn't always able to charge a premium, that benefit came from years of investment into software and community. I have not yet seen another SOC vendor or board partner realize this in any significant way.

How would they get traction when they have Raspberry Pi right there next to them?

Besides the price, anyway.

Spending money on linux devs who are available to help work through problems and keep systems up to date.

And how would that work compared to the army of free ones on the Raspberry Pi side?

You're not looking in the right places. I've had great experiences with EmbeddedTS, and their kernel seems to be close to upstream.

> The TS-7250-V3 is an industrial grade SBC based on the NXP i.MX 6UL with a 696MHz Arm® Cortex®-A7 core and 512 MB or 1 GB DDR3 RAM

This is their latest "High performance industrial grade embedded computer" that I can see on their website

Of course you'll have good upstream support for something as old as the i.MX6UL, it's been out for 8 years (7 years at the time they released the TS-7250-V3).

No wonder Raspberry Pi has upended the market, when a single core Cortex-A7 is the competition.

Even an Allwinner chip that has a terrible BSP at release has good upstream support 7 years later.

> All the other manufacturers have really really shitty BSPs in comparison,

I disagree. The NXP (i.MX line) and the TI (am62x) and the STM32 MP1/2 all have good mainline support.

What you say is true of most of the Chineese chips and of mobile chips but if you go with mainstream suppliers targeting the industrial / automative markets these days mainline Linux support is good at the SoC level. At the SoM level some are better than others but it's not that hard to pull the approriate DTS into your mainline kernel build even if it isn't already upstream.

RPi is probably better for hobbyists but that's not due to the mainline status but a community more in tune with hobbyists than the more industrial products.

I've built professional embedded Linux systems based in i.MX5/6/8 and STM32MP1 with mainline based BSP rather than vendor stuff but have only ever used the RPi for one off tools.

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