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Allwinner based boards have mainline kernel support for most features, they're one of a handful of vendors that has mainline support (primarily due to community

Allwinner based boards have mainline kernel support for most features, they're one of a handful of vendors that has mainline support (primarily due to community efforts). I personally like the OrangePi boards due to price & reliability, easy to set and forget without worrying about mSD corruption. http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page is pretty useful for a list of boards and info.

dtx1 9y ago
nice, thank you
stefan_ 9y ago
Not for any of the GPUs. If all you want is a terminal, you can pretty much buy anything..
- StudentStuff 9y ago
  You can run Gnome just fine, hardware accelerated video decoding/encoding works, HDMI with a few features is mainline, the only thing left is the Mali GPU, which is a fairly simple GPU as far as that kind of hardware goes, as compared to AMD or Nvidia GPUs. On that note, there has been a fair bit of activity on Lima as of late, which is a big change from a few years ago: https://github.com/yuq/linux-lima/tree/lima-4.16-rc5/drivers/gpu/drm/lima https://github.com/yuq/linux-lima/tree/lima-4.16-rc5/drivers...
  - TheCycoONE 9y ago
    Isn't Lima for 200 and 400 series. Tinkerboard needs has a 700 which already has kernel support but will need Panfrost for open source userspace.
    - StudentStuff 9y ago
      Lima is for 200 and 400 series, which were what we were discussing earlier in this thread.
    - quanto 9y ago
      how mature is Panfrost? I have a board with Mali T720 (Allwinner H6) and I cannot get any GPU support currently.
      - petecox 9y ago
        Does libhybris work with Allwinner SBCs? i.e. using ARM's proprietary driver for Mali from Android. (FOSS drivers might be in development but pragmatically I'd choose something that works)
      - TheCycoONE 8y ago
        Not useable yet. It has shaders and can draw triangles but no textures or FBOs.
trizic 9y ago
What makes Allwinner based boards less likely to have mSD corruption over others?
- opencl 9y ago
  The orangePi boards don't use microSD, they have built in eMMC storage. Far more reliable.
  - geppetto 9y ago
    On my 5 years old cubieboard server I experienced NAND corruption more often then not when power outage occurs. Never had this kind of problems since I switched to SD cards. In my experience SD cards are much slower but more reliable and easier to manage (backups and such).
    - opencl 9y ago
      There's no real inherent reliability difference between SD and eMMC, it's all down to the individual controller implementation. Though some SD slots are quite flaky, i.e. the original RasPi models. The eMMC that orangePi uses seems to be more reliable than the average SD card. Of course there are good SD cards out there and bad eMMC.
pritambaral 9y ago
That hasn't been my experience during the design our last product. Allwinner was the vendor we had to pass on because their then-best-offering (H5) had poor mainline support and fragile, crappy code in the kernel dump. We decided to go with the slightly more expensive RPi 3B precisely because it had both usable mainline support and the handful of patches in the RaspberryPi Foundation's kernel were much better written and maintained.
- StudentStuff 9y ago
  We use H3 based boards, but the H5 seems to be fairly mature. I know its been under heavy development wrt mainline kernel support for the last year, might want to take a peek at the status matrix: https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matrix https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matri...
  - pritambaral 9y ago
    H3 was already quite old back when we looked. The support offered by Allwinner for old chips (like the H3) back then was basically "If you're buying a ton, sure we'll support!", which was very off-putting. H5's mainline support is still lacking in key areas. I2C, I2S, and cpufreq are deal-breakers for our product. Of course, combined with the fact that it will soon be out of support for a not-huge-buyer like us, it is out-of-question. The status of their latest offering, the H6, in that matrix shows how bleak it was when we were looking at H5 for our board design. It was when the latest release of Linux was 4.4. You can see how few H5 features were supported with 4.4, almost exactly like how few are supported on the H6 today.
    - StudentStuff 9y ago
      Sure, none of these chips are new, and the older models (which are easily & cheaply accessible) have mainline support. I wouldn't expect jack from Allwinner besides their crummy kernel 3.4 branch, but that is the beauty in mainline support, you aren't limited to what Allwinner supports!

dtx1 9y ago

nice, thank you

stefan_ 9y ago

Not for any of the GPUs. If all you want is a terminal, you can pretty much buy anything..

StudentStuff 9y ago
You can run Gnome just fine, hardware accelerated video decoding/encoding works, HDMI with a few features is mainline, the only thing left is the Mali GPU, which is a fairly simple GPU as far as that kind of hardware goes, as compared to AMD or Nvidia GPUs. On that note, there has been a fair bit of activity on Lima as of late, which is a big change from a few years ago: https://github.com/yuq/linux-lima/tree/lima-4.16-rc5/drivers/gpu/drm/lima https://github.com/yuq/linux-lima/tree/lima-4.16-rc5/drivers...
- TheCycoONE 9y ago
  Isn't Lima for 200 and 400 series. Tinkerboard needs has a 700 which already has kernel support but will need Panfrost for open source userspace.
  - StudentStuff 9y ago
    Lima is for 200 and 400 series, which were what we were discussing earlier in this thread.
  - quanto 9y ago
    how mature is Panfrost? I have a board with Mali T720 (Allwinner H6) and I cannot get any GPU support currently.
    - petecox 9y ago
      Does libhybris work with Allwinner SBCs? i.e. using ARM's proprietary driver for Mali from Android. (FOSS drivers might be in development but pragmatically I'd choose something that works)
    - TheCycoONE 8y ago
      Not useable yet. It has shaders and can draw triangles but no textures or FBOs.

trizic 9y ago

What makes Allwinner based boards less likely to have mSD corruption over others?

opencl 9y ago
The orangePi boards don't use microSD, they have built in eMMC storage. Far more reliable.
- geppetto 9y ago
  On my 5 years old cubieboard server I experienced NAND corruption more often then not when power outage occurs. Never had this kind of problems since I switched to SD cards. In my experience SD cards are much slower but more reliable and easier to manage (backups and such).
  - opencl 9y ago
    There's no real inherent reliability difference between SD and eMMC, it's all down to the individual controller implementation. Though some SD slots are quite flaky, i.e. the original RasPi models. The eMMC that orangePi uses seems to be more reliable than the average SD card. Of course there are good SD cards out there and bad eMMC.

pritambaral 9y ago

That hasn't been my experience during the design our last product. Allwinner was the vendor we had to pass on because their then-best-offering (H5) had poor mainline support and fragile, crappy code in the kernel dump. We decided to go with the slightly more expensive RPi 3B precisely because it had both usable mainline support and the handful of patches in the RaspberryPi Foundation's kernel were much better written and maintained.

StudentStuff 9y ago
We use H3 based boards, but the H5 seems to be fairly mature. I know its been under heavy development wrt mainline kernel support for the last year, might want to take a peek at the status matrix: https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matrix https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matri...
- pritambaral 9y ago
  H3 was already quite old back when we looked. The support offered by Allwinner for old chips (like the H3) back then was basically "If you're buying a ton, sure we'll support!", which was very off-putting. H5's mainline support is still lacking in key areas. I2C, I2S, and cpufreq are deal-breakers for our product. Of course, combined with the fact that it will soon be out of support for a not-huge-buyer like us, it is out-of-question. The status of their latest offering, the H6, in that matrix shows how bleak it was when we were looking at H5 for our board design. It was when the latest release of Linux was 4.4. You can see how few H5 features were supported with 4.4, almost exactly like how few are supported on the H6 today.
  - StudentStuff 9y ago
    Sure, none of these chips are new, and the older models (which are easily & cheaply accessible) have mainline support. I wouldn't expect jack from Allwinner besides their crummy kernel 3.4 branch, but that is the beauty in mainline support, you aren't limited to what Allwinner supports!