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A comment on Reverse Engineering All the Raspberry Pis. Parent comment

Re:Reverse Engineering All the Raspberry Pis by ajb on Tuesday August 26, 2025 @01:20AM (#45022547)
Maybe they've improved, but banana pi/sinovoip used to ship images based on android kernels.

Rockchip have a reputation of fully working with the open source community, though I can't personally say how well. Most other SoC vendors only do enough to get android going.

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Re:Reverse Engineering All the Raspberry Pis by userbinator on Tuesday August 26, 2025 @01:49AM (#45022724)
Given that Android is basically the most popular "distro" of ARM Linux, that's not surprising.

However, I was referring to the availability of documentation which for these Chinese SoCs is either officially released or soon leaked.

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Re:Reverse Engineering All the Raspberry Pis by ajb on Tuesday August 26, 2025 @02:27AM (#45022955)
Leaked SoC documentation is a very long distance from having a fully working open ecosystem. Like, dozens of man-years -maybe hundreds. It would be a mistake to assume you can pick any of the sinovoip boards and get that. They use a number of SoC vendors with very different business models, and level of support for FOSS. Certainly there are some who make much less investment in maintaining an open ecosystem than RPI.
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