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The drivers and kernel support is provided by the chip vendor.

• bronson 11y ago
  Thats way oversimplified. These chip vendors have all supplied source dumps for their drivers. The reason the RPi works so well is all the work they're doing integrating their distributions (Raspbian is particularly good) and upstreaming stuff into the kernel.
  • bravo22 11y ago
    I'm not disagreeing about the work that RPi is doing. I was addressing this part: "getting a solid, reliable kernel with open source drivers is far from easy." If the chip vendor doesn't provide the drivers then the integrator can't either.
  • makomk 11y ago
    There's actually a fairly productive community-driven effort to upstream support for Allwinner boards: http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort I'm running Debian stable with a vanilla 4.5 kernel on my Cubieboard at the moment; the official Debian kernel works too but doesn't support audio out. Unfortunately, it's been somewhat slow going.
• rasz_pl 11y ago
  Anecdote : allwinner (or mediatek, cant remember now) developers that showed up at Linaro (last or 2 years ago) all sported iphones - this is all you need to know about support level of chinese SoC vendors.