While AllWinner provides dismal driver support, there's quite a big third party effort to get proper mainline support for their chips (Free Electrons being the

While AllWinner provides dismal driver support, there's quite a big third party effort to get proper mainline support for their chips (Free Electrons being the biggest contributor, I think). A good reference of what you can expected can be found here: http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort Of course it takes time to clean it up into a mainlineable state. Some years ago I got a "Cubietruck" (A20) and it was somewhat disappointing - the gigabit ethernet (which was the selling point for me) only got to only about double of 100Mbit, using up one of the two cores. It would also have network connections hang once in a while. This spring I dusted it off and managed to install the latest mainline kernel, and with the exception of onboard NAND (not really necessary since it has SATA), everything I care about works perfectly. I get proper gigabit without CPU stress, and everything is rock stable. tl;dr: it's worth looking at older devices of they fit your need