11-13-2017, 07:43 AM
Because the companies who make the SOC cant be botherd to open source there drivers and clean them up enough to get them merged them into Linux. Instead they hack just enough together to get Android working maximising ROI. Also Linux requires a support commitment and due to ARM growth being in it's infancy they want to drop support for a chip the same year, and get on with the next thing.
Most big distributions (debian, fedora, etc) build for ARM but due to the issue above leave the kernel to others.
This will hopefully change as The ARM / SOC market stabilises, but for now there are a few companies making the extra effort; raspberrypi, and odroid. Pine64 has chosen to leave GNU/Linux support to the community hoping that the Rock64 is such an attractive piece of hardware that developers will do the work for them. Only time will tell if that happens before the next fancy hardware is released.
Most big distributions (debian, fedora, etc) build for ARM but due to the issue above leave the kernel to others.
This will hopefully change as The ARM / SOC market stabilises, but for now there are a few companies making the extra effort; raspberrypi, and odroid. Pine64 has chosen to leave GNU/Linux support to the community hoping that the Rock64 is such an attractive piece of hardware that developers will do the work for them. Only time will tell if that happens before the next fancy hardware is released.
