You're probably getting downvoted because you did not follow up with "...because $reasons", so your post comes off as petty Linux hate (is there such word as "anti-fanboyism"?).
In the context, most other posts here contain no technical detail whatsoever either and are nothing more than unsubstantiated opinions (same as mine); they just really dislike that there is someone out there who doesn’t think that Linux is phenomenal. In the days of Microsoft dominance, we called that monoculture.
Volumes have been written and videos filmed on all the inadequacies of the GNU/Linux kernel, far more than I could cram into one “Hacker News” post. I for example get a painful reminder of just how unfit the Linux kernel is as firmware every time I turn on my television set which runs it (ARM V7 Linux for the curious). After that, I don’t want any more. That is not an isolated scenario.
Because people have been doing it since the 90s. Google use this on their Chromebook. Some of the people working on Coreboot, Heads, NERF have been doing it for a long time and they all seem to agree with each other.
Also, please tell me why the Linux kernel is so bad, but the BSDs are not? They are not that different and its hard to argue that they are much saver in terms of bugs (just look at the BSD talk at 34C3).
How long "people have been doing it" has nothing to do with the quality, it's a fallacy. They can't code if they can't even get the basics like polling or startup / shutdown correctly.
While both might be true, it does not change the fact that Linux is not a good choice for firmware because the product is simply bad. And asking for links (I did originally write videos and I meant those exact ones) and then complaining about having to watch through them is exactly what’s wrong with our industry. That kind of mentality spills over into code quality or lack thereof. It is high time to start owning up to it and change course.
So Linux (there is no GNU/Linux kernel, but a GNU/Linux OS) is more popular than how much you'd like it to be, and is that the problem? I for one am glad GPL-licenced free software is running on as much platforms as possible. In those cases Linux is basically a library they pick for their work. You can well say the same thing for glibc, gcc, apache, nginx etc. But in the end-user space nobody is forcing you to use Linux, and that's what monoculture is, not the choices regarding firmware with which the end user is not meant to ever interact.
So Linux (there is no GNU/Linux kernel, but a GNU/Linux OS) is more popular than how much you'd like it to be, and is that the problem?
That's a huge problem for me, because I get stuck dealing with problems solved in traditional UNIX operating systems anywhere from 30 to 20 years ago. It's extremely depressing to have to regress. If the future is Linux, then I want no part of such future.
But in the end-user space nobody is forcing you to use Linux
No? Then why do most companies today force me to work on Linux by insisting on running it? Why am I told in interviews "nah, they don't want to try ZFS or SmartOS... they're Linux people".
The delivery medium is irrelevant. And yes, this particular video is a good source, since the person in the video is an authority on kernel engineering; his teams have managed to deliver a fully functional storage appliance, a volume manager/filesystem from the future, infinitely extensible kernel and userspace debuggers, a dynamic tracing framework, a very high performance operating system which for more than two decades was the textbook on large scale symmetric multiprocessing, and a large scale cloud solution which mops the competition in efficiency and design of use. Oh, and a parallel startup/shutdown mechanism as part of a larger self-healing framework. I have a sneaking suspicion that this person might know what he’s talking about after having written and debugged a good portion of that code. I’m not putting in Linux as firmware because I already have it in the products and infrastructure I use and not only is it piss poor slow and inefficient and crashes all of the time, but greenhorns who think they know best keep introducing compatibility-breaking changes. Out of the question, no more. And polishing a piss poor solution is no solution either. Start with a solid foundation, which excludes Linux immediately from the consideration.
Literally nobody cares that you don't wanna do that with Linux. That's like your problem. The world needs practical solutions; not *NIX wars or zealotry.
There are practical solutions: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, SmartOS. Linux for firmware is not one of those, but if you think it is, good luck with using it for that. Don't bother to let me know how it worked out for you.