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BSP Tracker  /  BSP Status / Texas Instruments

TI AM62A (AM62A7)

Video encode and decode work upstream, which is unusual. But AM62A exists to do camera and AI, and both pillars — the VPAC3L ISP and the 2-TOPS C7x/MMA accelerator — have no upstream driver. On mainline a smart camera becomes raw Bayer capture with software 3A and CPU inference.

BSP branch ti-linux-6.18.yLinux 6.18Mainline since v6.1
See all 17 →
Security cliff
Upstream fixes for Linux 6.18 stop in December 2028 — 29 months from now.
The vendor BSP tracks Linux 6.18 on branch ti-linux-6.18.y. After that date no fixes arrive from upstream, and maintaining this kernel becomes your job.

Mainline instead of the vendor BSP

Can you ship mainline instead, and what exactly do you lose if you do?

Mainline, with named losses

BlockIPUpstreamDetail
VPUChips&Media Wave5upstreamCONFIG_VIDEO_WAVE_VPU — stateful H.264/HEVC encode and decode, depends on ARCH_K3.
NPUC7x DSP + MMA (2 TOPS)missingNo TI entry in drivers/accel. TIDL is proprietary and BSP-only.
ISPVPAC3LmissingNo ISP driver in drivers/media/platform/ti. CSI-2 capture works; hardware 3A/HDR does not.
GPUnonen/aAM62A is the vision/AI variant and has no 3D GPU.
Mainline since v6.1, verified by bracketing the device tree against the kernel tags: proof 1 · proof 2

Vendor BSP

Repository. https://git.ti.com/cgit/ti-linux-kernel/ti-linux-kernel

Newest branch that actually exists. ti-linux-6.18.y, tracking Linux 6.18. Last commit 2026-07-09.

Cadence. Same K3 branch set as AM62x, with PREEMPT_RT variants.

Silicon longevity

The vendor publishes no commitment. TI life-cycle policy only. No dated per-part commitment.

Vendor source

Yocto

Layer. meta-ti. A branch for the current LTS exists: wrynose.

Hardware you can buy

Evaluate on. SK-AM62A-LP

Production modules.

Notes

The third-party SoM ecosystem for AM62A is much thinner than for AM62x. That is itself a sourcing signal.

What to do about it

TI AM62A (AM62A7): upstream fixes stop December 2028. That leaves 29 months. After that date the kernel this BSP is based on receives no further security fixes from upstream, and maintaining it becomes your team’s responsibility.

There are three options:

  1. Backport the fixes yourself. Your team maintains a kernel that nobody else maintains: tracking each CVE, applying the patch to a tree that has diverged from upstream, and testing the result, for as long as the product ships.
  2. Move to the vendor’s newer BSP. This gives you a few more years of upstream fixes, and it costs a second bring-up: a new kernel, your patches forward-ported, drivers re-validated, and the product re-tested.
  3. Move to mainline. Mainline supports part of this SoC. The blocks marked above are the ones a migration has to solve or replace. It is the only option that does not have to be repeated when the next vendor kernel reaches end of life.

All three are engineering work, and all three are work we do: reading vendor kernel trees, checking what mainline actually supports, and moving products from one to the other. This page is built from the same work.

Embedded Linux engineering →Talk to us about your BSP

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