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Comment by angusgr | Hacker News Reader

Freescale i.MX6 is a really nice platform. Shame it hasn't gotten broader traction, I think because it is moderately more expensive than its competition.

Since May I've been using an imx6 based gk802 ($70 quad core "Android TV" stick) as a personal server (email, RSS, VPN, etc.) Has worked really nicely considering. (Blog post about installing debian on it: http://projectgus.com/2013/05/debian-installer-for-zealz-gk8... )

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Don't Freescale have a bad reputation for not being particularly open?

They are far more open than BCM or Qualcomm.

I haven't tried any of their other products, but the iMX6 has a very large detailed technical manual (publicly available, not under NDA) and their Linux kernel trees are updated in public via git (presumably not everything is public but it's a lot more transparent than the occasional tarball source drop approach), plus they have people involved in yocto development. Better than many/most of the ARM SoC manufacturers.

The only undocumented/secret squirrel business AFAIK is the Vivante GPU. And that's universal across ARM Soc GPUs, sadly.

Here's the i.MX6 documentation and file dump:

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?co...

The TRM is also here: http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/ref_manual/IMX6DQ... , all 7000+ pages of it.

I've built the Linux kernel and Android AOSP/ICS directly from their git repos and it all runs just fine. You can ask support questions on http://imxcommunity.org but the response you get will be sporadic. Your best bet at getting answers is to be a real customer and get an FAE to help you out. But otherwise I've never had a problem with a lack of "openness" from Freescale.

Thank you, this is fantastic!

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