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Rockchip has reputation for not following through with drivers for their ARM SoCs. I wonder if this will suffer the same fate or if perhaps ASUS will pick up t
by Quequau 10y ago
Rockchip has reputation for not following through with drivers for their ARM SoCs. I wonder if this will suffer the same fate or if perhaps ASUS will pick up the ball.
- 2bluesc 10y agoI'd love to know of SoC vendor that does. Intel and Wolfson are the only chip vendor that delivers above and beyond for Linux drivers that come to mind. Everything else is hack city in proprietary kernel forks that never see the light of mainline.
- stass 10y agoDrivers != Linux drivers. Also, TI and Freescale are both good with providing official driver source code of decent quality. Even Broadcom contributed a lot of drivers upstream.
- digi_owl 10y agoHeads up, Freescale is part of NXP Semiconductors now.
- rjsw 10y agoAnd soon to be part of Qualcomm.
- 2bluesc 10y ago> Drivers != Linux drivers. Can you elaborate on this? In theory they should be equal and the less userspace supporting tools for hardware the better. I guess I don't count userspace "drivers" as real drivers. Almost every time I've seen them they are epic hacks. Other times they are evading the GPL. > Also, TI and Freescale are both good with providing official driver source code of decent quality. Even Broadcom contributed a lot of drivers upstream. Come on now. I've worked on integrating Qualcomm, TI and Broadcom SoCs in to products. TI does quite a bit better then most, but I'd love to understand why an old chip that's built in to tons of industrial products like the AM3359 still has a kernel fork for it's advance features like the PRUSS. I worked on a project I first built 6 years ago on that platform and was appalled that they still hadn't managed to mainline the code. I haven't used the iMX directly, but I get the impression Freescale/NXP is similar to TI: drivers and datasheets are available, but the corporate will to merge to mainline isn't. I hope Qualcomm doesn't crush this. Is there any good reason my 2016 Google Pixel smartphone is running kernel 3.18? Ask Qualcomm. Broadcom, you have got to be kidding me? The Raspberry PI is treated as a continuous PR vehicle, no real reference manuals or proper datasheets to speak of for the public. Not to mention their "support" for their WiFi and Bluetooth drivers requires ripping up Windows drivers to extract firmware updates to try and make them half work on Linux.
- digikata 10y ago>> Drivers != Linux drivers. > Can you elaborate on this? There are other OS choices out in the world which sometimes get support -- particularly in this quasi-embedded space.
- steeve 10y agoI've done some kernel and Linux on Amlogic and Rockchip. This is the number one issue to me. For instance the ODROID C2 with non standard Linux kernel 3.14.... Even on Android you're stuck with old kernels and versions because SoC providers only ship binary blobs for old kernels (and sometimes old forked kernels)
- sjuut 10y agoODROID C2 has a quite OK mainline-kernel booting, check out the linux-meson.org project. Or latest build status: https://kernelci.org/boot/meson-gxbb-odroidc2/ https://kernelci.org/boot/meson-gxbb-odroidc2/
- CommanderData 10y agoI can confirm this sadly. I started working with RC3288 a while ago (almost two years ago). I discovered that drivers are nonexistent and although there was some talk of Mali drivers being released to Linux, I can't recall that happening. The box I have runs Linux fine with an image provided by the manufacturer however beyond that there is no 3d acceleration support for X when I checked last. The pi has better support but more importantly a stronger and closer relationship with broadcom.
- suprjami 10y agoI've read the PocketCHIP team is working on open source 3D for Mali but I haven't looked into it very deeply.