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A comment on Tiny quad-core system-on-module for makers and hardware startups. Parent comment

Re:Tiny quad-core system-on-module for makers and hardware s... by gh02t on Thursday February 22, 2018 @07:44PM (#16443113)
I mean upstream support in the Linux kernel. The Allwinner chip is supported by the mainline kernel, the one in the Raspberry Pi is not. To me that's a big plus in its favor.

Also in terms of support by the creators, if they're serious about the 10 year commitment then I'd say actually that is better than Raspberry Pi. Mindshare in the maker community isn't that important to someone doing serious embedded hardware development for production as long as the company behind it is solid. Which kinda sucks, I wish there was more incentive for chipmakers like Broadcom to be more open but...

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Re:Tiny quad-core system-on-module for makers and hardware s... by stefan_ on Thursday February 22, 2018 @08:14PM (#16443320)
No offence, but I think you haven't been keeping up-to-date. The RPi is fully supported by the mainline kernel, most significantly, there is a full atomic DRM kernel driver for the VC4 GPU and corresponding Mesa userland, maintained by someone with transistor-level access to hardware documentation.

I have great appreciation for the work Maxime Ripard et al. have been doing on mainline support for the various Allwinner chips, hence why I kicked in a few bucks for their kickstarter on reverse-engineering the Allwinner VPU:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bootlin/allwinner-vpu-s...

But lets not kid ourselves, none of this was Allwinners doing and they could not give a fuck about mainline Linux.

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Re:Tiny quad-core system-on-module for makers and hardware s... by gh02t on Thursday February 22, 2018 @08:24PM (#16443373)
Wow you're right, not sure how I missed that. Guess I just got too used to all those years of Broadcom chips being giant clusterfucks of patches and old kernels.
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