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I was actually looking into the Orange Pi this weekend... the driver situation remains a deal killer for me. Sadly the Raspberry Pi offers crap hardware with a

by blihp 3y ago

I was actually looking into the Orange Pi this weekend... the driver situation remains a deal killer for me. Sadly the Raspberry Pi offers crap hardware with almost good drivers while most of the other SBC's offer good hardware with crap drivers and/or binaries only for specific kernel releases. It's impressive how actively bad ARM is for anything remotely user facing on Linux... nVidia wasn't even this bad for this long.

ThatPlayer 3y ago
The older RK3399 boards are basically mainlined. The PinePhone Pro uses a variant of that SoC, the RK3399S. But it's an older SoC these days. The open source Panfrost GPU drivers for that are great though: full desktop OpenGL support! Not just that OpenGLES stuff. Pine64 does have a newer QuartzPro64 that they're also working on mainline support for. The Orange Pi 5 uses the same SoC. And yeah support isn't there yet, but I'm hopeful: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstreaming_Status https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstrea...
- blihp 3y ago
  Right, that's the problem: getting mainline support while the processor is still relevant rather than years after the fact... if at all.[1] Also, the bar has moved. OpenGL was good enough 10 years ago. What about OpenCL? Vulkan? NPU support? HDMI in? etc. (I'm very interested in the functionality the 3588 offers but not if that functionality is just on paper with the hope that maybe someday someone gets it working or if I need to run a cobbled together kernel build that won't see meaningful updates) [1] There have been plenty of devices where someone was working on drivers and then the developer moved on or a new revision was released etc and the original thing never gets the support people bought it anticipating.
- chazeon 3y ago
  The CPU yes, but not for peripherals. The Wi-Fi on my Orange Pi 4B dropped connections after 5 mins and cannot connect afterwards using Armbian image.
  - ThatPlayer 3y ago
    I just tried the latest Armbian on my Orange Pi 4 and it's even worse. HDMI output has been broken for almost a year.

by blihp 3y ago

ThatPlayer 3y ago

The older RK3399 boards are basically mainlined. The PinePhone Pro uses a variant of that SoC, the RK3399S. But it's an older SoC these days. The open source Panfrost GPU drivers for that are great though: full desktop OpenGL support! Not just that OpenGLES stuff. Pine64 does have a newer QuartzPro64 that they're also working on mainline support for. The Orange Pi 5 uses the same SoC. And yeah support isn't there yet, but I'm hopeful: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstreaming_Status https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstrea...

blihp 3y ago
Right, that's the problem: getting mainline support while the processor is still relevant rather than years after the fact... if at all.[1] Also, the bar has moved. OpenGL was good enough 10 years ago. What about OpenCL? Vulkan? NPU support? HDMI in? etc. (I'm very interested in the functionality the 3588 offers but not if that functionality is just on paper with the hope that maybe someday someone gets it working or if I need to run a cobbled together kernel build that won't see meaningful updates) [1] There have been plenty of devices where someone was working on drivers and then the developer moved on or a new revision was released etc and the original thing never gets the support people bought it anticipating.
chazeon 3y ago
The CPU yes, but not for peripherals. The Wi-Fi on my Orange Pi 4B dropped connections after 5 mins and cannot connect afterwards using Armbian image.
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  I just tried the latest Armbian on my Orange Pi 4 and it's even worse. HDMI output has been broken for almost a year.