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by phh 1750 days ago
> You seem to not understand who exactly provides kernels for Android and other embedded devices.

Oh, I perfectly understand how those things work, I've Google-certified more smartphones than I can count (which means more than 50), and that's merely one line of my resume.

In my comment, I mention Sony who upgraded their major kernel version. How does it fit your mental model of embedded system's BSPs?

I currently work in a company who provides software upgrades for a 10 years-old STB. This 10 years-old STB (that's older than the Nexus 4) is currently running Linux 5.4, and is planned to run Linux 5.14 in a few months, at millions of customers' home.

Are we bigger than Google? Gosh no, by orders of magnitude. Are we spending a lot of time on this? Well nope, we don't even need one person full-time to upgrade kernel version. Are we paying that person a lot? Nope, they could probably move to Google 500 meters away and have at the very least double salary.

Of course SoC-vendor stopped providing us with upgrades aeons ago.

But, contrary to Google, we actually have monetary incentives to keep supporting this device.