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I don’t understand why other boards can’t get themselves fully on the Linux mainline, that would take away at least a part of the rPi advantage. There are still

I don’t understand why other boards can’t get themselves fully on the Linux mainline, that would take away at least a part of the rPi advantage. There are still a lot of limitations there relative to an x86 computer, although I’m not clear how much those are limitations of the Linux Arm ecosystem, and how much those are to do with the lack of mainline support, the need for blob drivers etc. I wanted to test out a webcam on rPi, there’s as massive difference between just being able to install VLC from repositories as you can on x86, and what you have to do on rPi, to compile a special version to work with the rPi’s proprietary graphics/video stack.

momzer 8y ago
> I don’t understand why other boards can’t get themselves fully on the Linux mainline They're slowly getting pulled in kicking [1] and screaming [2]. I just installed the mainline arm64 version of Archlinux onto an Orange Pi Zero Plus, and I was pleasantly surprised that I only had to compile one out-of-tree driver (rtl8189fs for WiFi). [1] https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort [2] https://linux-sunxi.org/Mainline_U-Boot#Status https://linux-sunxi.org/Mainline_U-Boot#Status
ac29 8y ago
Many Amlogic boards are on fully upstream Linux, see http://linux-meson.com http://linux-meson.com I'd recommend Armbian, a nice distro for ARM SBC's: https://www.armbian.com/ https://www.armbian.com/ Of course, as with everything in ARM-linux land, GPU drivers are still a WIP. For headless use, it works well though.