Status/Progress of CherryTrail / BayTrail support in mainline Linux kernel

[Hanno Zulla]

Hi,

sorry for asking a possibly obvious question, but:

Why is support for Cherry Trail / Bay Trail so bad in the mainline
kernel? Is this being worked on? And where can one help or track the
progress with improving this?

Recently, I bought a Win10 netbook to install Linux on. It's a
beautiful small device with a fanless Z3735F CPU. Just right for my
kids as their first own computer.

After using Intel hardware since several years without a hitch, it was
surprising to find this not being fully supported by current 2016 Linux
distributions.

The Wifi is not running at all, lost the network with a Wifi stick that
works fine on RPi and the system freezes every now and then for no
reproducible reasons. Googling around, all I found were similar
complaints by other Linux users and a confusing array of incomplete
third-party driver projects not ready for mainline, like this one:

https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs/issues/96

Also, there's a litany of "don't buy Cherry Trail or Bay Trail devices
for Linux" articles, which probably would have been helpful to read
before buying that fateful device.

This is sad to watch. I tried to find a different device for my kids,
but all of the netbook-like devices on the market now share this
problem. A whole generation of very interesting devices appears to be
lost for Linux users.

Is there hope for this device class or does one have to stick to Core i
CPUs for the time being?

Kind regards,

Hanno