I don't understand why they go through so much effort to churn out these boards that are made useless by lack of upstreaming.

Oh, wait, because idiots like me keep buying them and finding this out too late. Thanks for saving me $20 this time.

> I don't understand why they go through so much effort to churn out these boards that are made useless by lack of upstreaming.

Because the board vendor, generally, doesn't know any more about this stuff than you do. They buy an SoC from a manufacturer (Allwinner in this case) and drop it on the board. Whatever "Linux" BSP the vendor provides then gets hacked into form for their product and shipped. They aren't really in any sane position to take maintainership of this code or upstream it on their own.

And going further, Allwinner is themselves just assembling IP blocks from other vendors (companies like ARM and Synopsys) that they don't completely understand. They get a sample driver, drop it in a tree, fix bugs, and ship it.

It's a big mess. The bigger vendors (e.g. Intel and Qualcomm) do a decent job of putting together solid BSPs (even if they don't always play well with the community -- the packages received by board vendors usually work and come with solid docs). The little guys just aren't there yet.

They buy enough of them to get a datasheet. Just releasing that would be enough.

The datasheet is a copyrighted document received under NDA. They literally can't.

And again, a datasheet from Allwinner is going to just tell you what the instantiation parameters for all the various IPs are. To write a driver for, I dunno, the I2C controller (or whatever, I know nothing about this SoC in particular) you're going to need a Synopsys databook or something.

There's a framework in place for distributing all that stuff between OEMs and first-tier customers. But with the exception of a handful of hardware vendors, no one's ever cared about getting it out to the public.

The datasheets are released and you can freely download them. For the Allwinner A64 documentation (another 64-bit SoC, which is very similar to H5) you can check https://linux-sunxi.org/A64#Documentation

And no, it is not a "stolen" or "leaked" documentation (I have actually seen such ridiculous claims in the phoronix forum). It is hosted on the Pine64 website with the permission from Allwinner. And the Pine64 people specifically asked Allwinner to remove the misleading "confidential" watermarks from the PDF files.

Allwinner H5 is very new and this Orange Pi PC 2 board is probably the very first piece of hardware using it. But I expect that the H5 documentation will become available in public access shortly. Just like the documentation for the older Allwinner chips. Maybe initially with the "confidential" watermark again, because the Allwinner people are a little bit lazy and don't seem to understand why the open source people are making so much fuss about this.

Is banana pi among them ?

> I don't understand why they go through so much effort to churn out these boards that are made useless by lack of upstreaming.

I don't believe that this sort of business venture requires that much effort. It appears that in essence they only repackage a currently available soc, and hope that the market bites.

The main reason why these small boards come with a quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM is that currently that's precisely the standard for low to mid-end smartphones running Android.

Of course, the people behind the Raspberry Pi foundation do a bit more than repackaging a bare-bones SoC. Hence, they do manage to sell quality products that actually work.

HN just saved me money, another idiot here.

Could you explain "lack of upstreaming?" I get, via context, and know what upstream is, I context of OSs, I've never read a "lack of."

The board requires custom modifications to the kernel. These modifications never get cleaned up and submitted as patches to the kernel. So you are stuck with a kernel frozen in time.

And this is the situation with damn near every ARM board you can buy! It's depressing. I finally had to give up on my Efika MX smartbook because they never got past a 2.6 kernel, which IIRC eventually meant I couldn't upgrade libc past a certain point, which meant I couldn't upgrade anything else.

Yes it is and it is terrible. The lack of upstreaming also makes things like applying the PREEMPT_RT patches much more difficult than it should be. You might be stuck at a version of the kernel where PREEMPT_RT was never released, not to mention you will be missing the PREEMPT_RT changes in the custom code.

BTW, just Linux "2.6" means nothing these days.

Phone hardware is absolutely infuriating in this regard. People figured out how to standardize bootloaders and do drivers on the PC decades ago, why can't SBC and phone manufacturers figure this out?

Why can't their be a generic build of Android that will at least boot on every phone, even if there might be some driver issues on different devices? This situation has gone on for so long it is past the point of being a joke. And don't try to tell me that there is a good technical reason why it has to be this way, we're talking about machines that are as powerful as a mid 2000s PC, you can afford the overhead of a bootloader on there.

They have a bootloader, they just don't have a BIOS, or ACPI, which you would need for the operating system to detect and interface with peripherals.

I think right now they are trying to decide between Device Tree (FDT) and ACPI for ARM, in the mean time nothing gets done and I'm not confident anything will get done until ARM the IP holder itself mandates something.

Shouldn't this have been done years ago? Do all of these manufacturers like reinventing the wheel every time they spin a new silicon? Didn't building custom bootloaders for every device get old a long long time ago?

The systems powered by these ARM processors were typically bespoke embedded software anyway, so not many people cared. Hardware vendor provides a bootloader of sorts and some shitty SDK or RTOS patch, you heap your own custom code on top and ship it. Never update any of the components, that's just asking for extra work.

Now that the processors are powerful enough to replace what would ordinarily run Windows or Linux it's very painful. The Linux code is littered with support files for a bazillion of different boards and hardware platforms.

And even that is targeted at servers I think.

I don't think that you know what you are talking about. Please check the https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort page.

Every new mainline kernel release includes improvements for Allwinner chips. Older Allwinner chips, such as A10 and A20, are already supported very well. The support for newer chips is progressing nicely, but there is always a bit of delay.

Yes, you can't expect this newly released Orange Pi PC 2 board to be already supported in the mainline kernel today. But maybe half a year later everything is likely going to be much better. And even right now, there should be some sort of a legacy 3.10 kernel available too, so it is not like you can't use the board at all.

got it. thanks!

"made useless by lack of upstreaming"

... only if you actually need particular features of the CPU. We're running a dozen of these boards with mainline bootloader, kernel, and Xenial.

But they're headless servers. We don't need the GPU, which is the major component lacking support in mainline. You have to run a legacy 3.4 kernel and binary driver for GPU acceleration and OpenGL. :(

I think this chunk of industry is going right now through its enthusiastic adolescence. It's a phase. It will pass. It will eventually mature, and will separate the wheat from the chaff.

Crappy upstream kernel support on alternative boards is probably why the Raspberry Pi is king of this kingdom.

I chose to forgo all the cheaper options from China for a recent project, and instead go with (considerably) more expensive Raspberry Pi 3's, because I didn't want to risk the shite software support. I know I'm going to get kernel and firmware upgrades on those boards for a good long while, and that's one less thing I have to worry about.

You could have gone with the one of the BeagleBone varieties. BeagleBoard seems to be the only real contender that the Pi line faces, from a community standpoint. Each unit is a few bucks more, but that'll go towards strengthening an ecosystem around boards that are even more open than what you get with the Pi.

It's hard to get the benefits of volume when everyone keeps going for the cheaper-right-now board in order to maximize their own short-term benefits. Contributing to the network effect by buying a Pi because it's cheaper and more popular is not exactly the thing that will lead to Broadcom getting rebuffed and having to answer for all their problems.

I bought one board with an Allwinner chip on it. Great specs, but utterly useless. There is no support for the graphics driver, tons of bugs in the chipset, and virtually no help online unless maybe if you speak Mandarin.

I'm not making that mistake again.

All this talk has made me glad to pay the premium to stay with x86/amd64 supported boards. I've been buying PC-Engines for years, and run whatever I please on them (but mostly OpenBSD). They are 3x the price of the RPi (more if you want WiFi, bluetooth etc), but for certain applications, are quite a bit more powerful and flexible. This is especially true if you want to remain up to date for years. I have never been left without an upgrade path.

https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

https://pcengines.ch/newshop.php?c=4

There's the UP board now, Cherry Trail Atom in a RasPi format, and the UP Squared (Apollo Lake, Altera Max 10 (2K) right,physically about double the RasPi) in Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/802007522/up-squared-th... .

If not for boards, I just bought this https://www.amazon.com/dp/B019Z8T9J0 complete, passive PC for less $150, it has four Ethernet ports and a HDMI and a Broadwell (not Atom!) CPU. It's rather incredible how cheap PCs gotten.

It could have been so great, but wasn't meant to be. I got exited for a moment, and then my hopes were dashed. 49RMB for a zero is like cereal money. It's the price of 490g Kellogs Fruit Muesli on Taobao. There had to be a catch. But at least I didn't spend 128RMB on a SBC that doesn't work, then 8 hours on trying to make it run.

Edit: Having looked checked for authorized resellers of Raspberry Pis in China, it just got more confusing.

What happened to EGOMAN, which the Raspberry Pi foundation partnered up in 2013 to produce Raspberry Pis? They only have the first model red pi, and they have stopped advertising them. They make waterproof heartrate monitors now.

Seed studio is one of 2 authorized resellers of element14 in China. They're based in Shenzhen. They sell in JPY, but not RMB. How does that work?

The only authorized reseller that actually sells on taobao is Hangzhou Junroc Electronic Technology co ltd. They sell Model 3 B's for 195RMB + 10RMB shipping. Why do Element14 and RS China charge 260RMB? How do they sell these for cheaper than their distributor? Overhead? Aren't they made here?

How does the ODROID2 work? It's 40USD, or 52,800 won in Korea. 52,800 won is 46USD. Granted, there's 16$ shipping for international orders.

Nothing makes sense to me anymore.

Is it only the raspberry pi which sees effort to have upstream kernel support? Or are there any other similar boards doing better than the pi?

My take is that nobody is doing better than Pi in terms of the community Pi targets, e.g. students, amateurs and greenhorns alongside professionals. There's a critical mass with Pi that attracts industry players to be on the platform with what counts for decent support in the embedded world, e.g. Microsoft and Canonical.

For me, that's worth $15 per board.

> For me, that's worth $15 per board.

Unfortunately, the Raspberry Pi 3 sells for over 50€ per board.

The Raspberry Pi zero, in spite of being marketed as a 10€ computer, in practice can't be purchased at all.

In the US, the Pi 3 runs about $35 on Amazon. VAT may effect pricing in other places.

The Raspberry Pi Zero has been in stock for the last couple of weeks.

Look at http://www.whereismypizero.com/

"THIS PRODUCT IS LIMITED TO 1 UNIT PER CUSTOMER"

Always. Everywhere. Wanted 25 units to teach a robot class to some local kids at the Hackerspace. Had to buy 3's instead. Even if I'd placed 25 separate orders, the cost of individual shipping on each vs the cost savings of the combined shipping on the 3's put the price within spitting distance.

Pi zero is an ad. A loss leader. A way to have an answer, any answer, to the flood of $7 Allwinner wonder-boards on AliExpress.

The Zero is a very different devboard, though - you will need to invest in assorted adapters and hubs if you want to connect it to just about anything other than power... it is useful in small spaces, but for anything else spending a little more to get something like the CHIP is well worth it, and for use a small PC, going to the RPi 3 is probably wiser.

Yup, that's how it's supposed to be.

Want to make a micro-computer? Get the RPi 3.

Want to make a robot or drone? Get the RPi Zero.

The Raspberry Pi 3 is available from many vendors for $35 + sales taxes. You can pick it up on our site for £32 including VAT (that's EUR30 before taxes or EUR36 including taxes): https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-3

Texas Instruments am335x also is a popular chip with upstream support (Beaglebone Black & Olinuxino am3352-som and quite a few other vendors have modules based on it.) If you want a canonical list, look in the kernel arch/arm/boot/dts source: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st...

Actually it looks like there are quite a few Allwinner devices listed (look for sun__...)

ODroid C2 and XU4 have been making progress, though last I saw they weren't really stable yet. I think HardKernel, the manufacturer, is providing some level of support for the mainlining effort.

Next Thing says the C.H.I.P. (or at least the C.H.I.P. Pro) runs mainline Linux, but that's not really comparable to the current Raspberry Pi.

Does it have support for the graphics though? That's the first big stumbling block these alternate SBCs run into. Without support for graphics acceleration you won't be able to play video properly or run fancy desktop apps. It's a huge drawback these days.

I believe C.H.I.P. does now.

In a pre-alpha driver as I recall.

If you don't care about graphics, i.MX6 boards are pretty well supported.

There's a lot of uncertainty about how long that will last since NXP/Freescale is now Qualcomm's manufacturing arm.

the Pine64's kernel support is basically being done entirely by a community member

Is the graphics driver also being worked upon? I think Pine64 uses mali which is not well supported by upstream.

The Kodi people are not to be trusted on this matter, it's just an ugly political game. See http://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=1497&pid=13513#pi... And also https://github.com/linux-sunxi/libvdpau-sunxi if you are actually interested in a working hardware accelerated video decoding. To sum it up, hardware video decoding acceleration works fine with fully open source drivers on Allwinner hardware, but the Kodi application just does not want to use them. Fortunately there are also other open source media players, which can do the job.

As for the lubuntu image, anyone can take any ARM Linux distribution rootfs and combine it with the Linux kernel, built for Allwinner hardware (both mainline and legacy kernels exist). You can find a lot of tutorials at https://linux-sunxi.org

But if you are not a very experienced user, I strongly suggest you to try something like the armbian distribution first.

> They have dismal linux support. Old kernels; and no releases. Poor video drivers.

Unpatched ancient kernels are the future of IoT botnets.

Compared to RaPi it looks bad, but if you compare OrangePi to say ESP8266, it looks like a good deal (for certain projects):

* OS and scheduler v/s low-level partially documented SDK

* 2GB RAM v/s 100s of KB in ESP8266

* 16GB Flash v/s couple of MB Flash on ESP8266

* All other goodies: 4USB ports, Audio/Video, HDMI, Camera, SATA, IR

* 15$ v/s 5$

Have you checked armbian? for example: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/724-quick-review-of...

Do the above arguments apply to the board range, or just their distro? Whilst not yet supporting Orange Pi PC2, what about Armbian? http://www.armbian.com

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

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