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BSP Tracker  /  BSP Status / NXP

NXP i.MX6ULL

Ship on mainline. No GPU, no VPU, no NPU means nothing proprietary to lose. The reason to touch the BSP is legacy vendor userspace, not missing drivers.

BSP branch lf-6.18.yLinux 6.18Mainline since v4.10
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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 lf-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 is shippable

BlockIPUpstreamDetail
GPUnonen/aNo 3D GPU on this SoC.
PXP2D PXPupstreamCONFIG_VIDEO_IMX_PXP
CameraCSI bridgeupstreamVIDEO_IMX7_CSI names the i.MX6UL/L family explicitly.
Mainline since v4.10, verified by bracketing the device tree against the kernel tags: proof 1 · proof 2

Vendor BSP

Repository. https://github.com/nxp-imx/linux-imx

Newest branch that actually exists. lf-6.18.y, tracking Linux 6.18. Last commit 2026-06-09.

Cadence. Branches are family-wide. Whether an 11-year-old 32-bit part is still enabled on lf-6.18.y is NOT verified.

Silicon longevity

The vendor publishes no commitment. No row in NXP's longevity table. The part launched around 2015; availability is the biggest risk in a new design.

Vendor source

Yocto

Layer. meta-imx. A branch for the current LTS exists: wrynose-6.18.20-2.0.0.

meta-imx-bsp/conf/layer.conf on wrynose-6.18.20-2.0.0 declares LAYERSERIES_COMPAT_fsl-bsp-release with wrynose, and the branch still ships imx6ull14x14evk.conf and imx6ull9x9evk.conf. NXP keeps this ARM32 part in the current release.

Hardware you can buy

Evaluate on. i.MX 6ULL EVK

Production modules.

Notes

Treat as a mainline part with a supply-chain question mark, not a BSP question mark.

What to do about it

NXP i.MX6ULL: 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 this SoC, so the migration is substantial work but not research. 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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An email when a kernel series reaches end of life, a board row changes, or a layer picks up a release branch. Nothing else.

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