[jacquesm]

When building a product for embedded applications closed source libraries and drivers that do not support your platform are no obstacle at all. You contact the vendor and make a deal. That's in their - and your - interest.

This is a totally different world than the open source world that you are referencing, likely that embedded product will also not be open source. Commercial licensing is your only option in that case anyway, unless you are just looking for FOSS stuff with permissive licenses, but in that case those won't be closed source to begin with...

So the problem you perceive simply does not exist. The biggest questions will revolve around commercial viability, proof-of-concept and time to market. Rarely around such details as closed source libraries or drivers. Though, in case your supplier goes belly up those could become factors, but for that you have escrow agreements.

[jkravitz61]

Respectfully, it is absolutely an obstacle. Not every manufacturer wants to play ball and in some cases it requires much more investment than playing around with the compiler settings. I would also argue that a large fraction of research teams/ companies are just looking for a platform to prototype on rather than actually deploy services on tomorrow. Most applications of this processor are such low volume that it’s not in most manufactures interests financially to care at this point.

[ianhowson]

Practically every chip vendor provides a free toolchain for their products. The only major exception I can think of are automotive parts, where the customer is always a multi-billion-dollar corporation.

arm64 is very common (Android!) and Xavier runs stock Ubuntu. If your camera manufacturer doesn't ship a driver for arm64, you should speak to them. It's extremely likely that they have one already.

[stevenhuang]

Sorry, no. It's still a problem. You can say there are work arounds. Just because it's always been this way doesn't mean it can't be made better.

[jacquesm]

Could you give an example for when this has been a problem? I've done quite a few embedded projects and have not encountered any to date, though I'm not too old to learn.

[voltagex_]

Try that with Broadcom and get back to me.

[jacquesm]

Mostly a matter of MOC. If you're a hobbyist that definitely isn't going to fly. If you need a few million chips then you're going to be able to make a deal.

The problem is that chips like that are about as hacker unfriendly as they could be. But in industry hardly any of that matters.

Being in the middle - hundreds to tens of thousands of units to ship - is the toughest place of all. No vendors will talk to you and you're going to be out of options if someone decides to EOL that chip your design depends on.

In that case I would advise to only use open hardware and to take the associated performance, size and power requirements hit. At least your product will live.