System-on-Chip vendors typically provide a board support package (BSP) whichshould be a good starting point to develop the software for an embedded Linuxsystem. However they often seem to misunderstand what the software designerswant, and deliver something that makes their life harder without any apparentbenefit. 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-onlytools. You will discover why he spent weeks in understanding, fixing and workingaround BSPs instead of just using them. The effects on the final productquality will be described as well. Luca will also discuss what the options are when you face such a BSP, and whatboth hackers and vendors can do to improve the situation for everybody'sbenefit.