Hello,
The questions here are relevant and I want to add some points to be considered:
The first thing is that RAM consumption analyses are sometimes not that simple. I wouldn’t be so quick to say that wayland has a bigger memory consumption than X, especially anything really significant. If there’s a strict low memory usage requirement, the customer must carefully vet everything that goes into their image and what services are started. Our reference images are meant to be used to showcase the hardware abilities of our modules in a way that makes it easy for customers to start their evaluation process. Customers are welcome to use our images as a starting point for developing their own images that fit the project requirements.
Second, I’m not very experienced in low battery consumption requirements but I would like to point out that memory technology has been evolving in this direction. For instance, our Verdin modules use LPDDR4 RAM that’s specifically designed for low power consumption scenarios. I can’t say for sure if a Verdin with 1GB of memory is comparable in power consumption to an older module with 512MB of RAM, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that would be the case.
Third, Toradex bases our BSP offers on what the manufacturer of the SoC provides. We work hard to make sure that our modules are well-integrated and all the HW features are supported. We also do extensive testing to make sure that everything works as expected. Additionally, we put a lot of effort to make sure that our modules can run with mainline kernels. At the end of the day, we usually don’t take upon ourselves to support features that are not supported officially in the SoC BSP. X support is an example of that, as NXP dropped official support for it on their BSP, we cannot keep up with this support ourselves. Our team is significantly smaller than NXP’s teams and we cannot make sure all GPU features work well on the entire range of modules we provide to our customers. On the other hand, we also try our best to make sure that our customers are not blocked from using the software that they see fit.
Now, to answer your questions directly:
What are the plans for continued pure X11 (no Wayland/Weston/xwayland) support on what hardware going forward?
We have no plans to officially support X11 anymore. Customers are welcome to use it themselves and see if the results fit the project requirements.
Is Toradex going to officially support one or more Embedded DOS platforms? There are quite a few, some free, some not.
There are no plans in this direction at the moment.
When will Toradex officially jump on the Mbed OS wagon?
For this, we also don’t have any plans.
I hope this clarifies some points,
Rafael