Linux Kernal Development - BETA Boards

[tkaiser]

That said, my end goal is getting Arch onto the pine64

Where's the point? As usual with a new Allwinner SoC we have an outdated kernel 3.x.something (good news: It's not 3.3/3.4 but 3.10.65 instead). Someone will manage to get the kernel booting in linux and that's all that's needed to combine a rootfs with bootloader/kernel. It will be ugly and slow but since it's that easy 'distro developers' will flood the net with crappy Linux distros for the Pine64.

People who care are concerned:



"End of 2015". If no one applies all kernel fixes up to 3.10.94 to Allwinner's 3.10.65 kernel within the next 4 days, the Pine64 will not be able to run with a kernel that is useable from a security point of view within the next 6/9/12 months. Support for kernel 3.10 stops right now and there's simply nothing else. None of the linux-sunxi kernel developers seems to be interested and at the moment mainline kernel support is not even in an alpha state: 

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/...e_UhiO00t8
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/...3S4Dlmu2hc

I don't expect the situation to improve soon. Allwinner's bootloader still makes use of the sys_config.fex stuff (good news for Allwinner's real customers who sell millions of Android devices and get an development environment they're familiar with) and it seems you can define mismatching settings in sys_config.fex and .dts (the latter being used by the kernel).

As usual mainlining efforts will start from scratch and this will take some time. At the moment the Pine64 people rely solely on community's efforts (the C.H.I.P. people for example hired free-electrons to speed up development) so I would suspect we get many crappy OS images first (using Allwinner's u-boot and kernel implementation) and something useable at the end of 2016 maybe.