> Updating to a new major kernel version takes multiple man years of work
What factor of man years do you imagine OS vendors put into release engineering ? Some open source vendors support multiple streams of the same kernel across multiple architectures all at the same time for over 10 years. The problem is not impossible, not even hard, just work.
> Probably 500k to 2M lines of kernel code for such a router.
What functionality do they include that is not included in standard Linux ? I have setup a router that does the same as these systems with little work. No fancy GUI though.
I _guess_ they could not upstream their kernels ./arch. However the arch specific code doesn't churn hard between major releases.
Do you think you're overselling the complexity they have to manage ?
> The home router industry is a hardware business, it is run by hardware experts and they run software like hardware.
I think this is the crux of the discussion, they simply do not consider software updates as part of the life cycle, until they get customer demand they will not.
What factor of man years do you imagine OS vendors put into release engineering ? Some open source vendors support multiple streams of the same kernel across multiple architectures all at the same time for over 10 years. The problem is not impossible, not even hard, just work.
> Probably 500k to 2M lines of kernel code for such a router.
What functionality do they include that is not included in standard Linux ? I have setup a router that does the same as these systems with little work. No fancy GUI though.
I _guess_ they could not upstream their kernels ./arch. However the arch specific code doesn't churn hard between major releases.
Do you think you're overselling the complexity they have to manage ?
> The home router industry is a hardware business, it is run by hardware experts and they run software like hardware.
I think this is the crux of the discussion, they simply do not consider software updates as part of the life cycle, until they get customer demand they will not.