[Cerowrt-devel] So how far behind is the embedded router world, still?

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Wed, 25 Jul 2018, Dave Taht wrote:

> There are still a few companies alive in this space (openrg being one 
> that I know nothing about), but...

There is no single answer to this. Lots of the home routing SoC space is 
now converging on 4.4, but BCM decided to go for 4.1. They came from 3.2, 
3.4 and perhaps 3.10. When I talk to staff at SoC vendors, they seem to 
live in a world where you take a linux kernel that's announced as LTS (in 
the best of worlds), work on that for 1-2 years during which you release 
an SDK, which then the device manufacturers will take and start putting 
their solutions on, which takes another 1-2 years before it reaches 
customers. So already there is significant latency.

This doesn't mean there are not devices out there today, newly installed, 
that have really ancient kernels (as you have discovered). This is 
especially true for cheaper and simpler devices that are very cost 
optimized.

There is movement in the right direction, but revving kernels on older 
platforms is still hard, as in all of IoT space, due to lack of revenue 
from older platforms. Main model is still to sell a device and then there 
is no further income, so no money to continously develop the device.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se