System-on-Chip vendors typically provide a board support package (BSP) which should be a good starting point to develop the software for an embedded Linux system. However they often seem to misunderstand what the software designers want, and deliver something that makes their life harder without any apparent benefit.

In this talk Luca will share some of his experiences with such vendor BSPs, featuring jurassic kernels, non-working drivers, non-existing bootloaders, code of appallingly bad quality, ineffective customer support and Windows-only tools.

You will discover why he spent weeks in understanding, fixing and working around BSPs instead of just using them. The effects on the final product quality will be described as well.

Luca will also discuss what the options are when you face such a BSP, and what both hackers and vendors can do to improve the situation for everybody's benefit.