(01-06-2016, 04:42 PM)nomadewolf Wrote: I people want Linux with accelerated graphics, this board is a no go, no matter what! Unfortunately this is my case
This is inaccurate given the information we have as of right now. If people want accelerated graphics and linux > 3.0.x *now*, it is a no go. Otherwise, with a bit of dev and elbow grease, it's got a decent chance of working. I accept that there may be some people who want accelerated graphics and new kernel features like containers, but I expect that number to be fairly low. Do you *need* a kernel > 3.0.x? Is it a showstopper for you? I'm always curious to know what other people want to do, so this is genuine interest rather than sarcasm.
Keep in mind that Allwinner claim to have a timeline for releasing newer kernels as they release Android updates. True, this is not as good as mainline, they aren't available immediately etc, but this is a fairly new SoC so we are guaranteed that it'll happen because no one is going to buy an SoC to make Android devices that can't run L or M.
Granted, some people say the Allwinner blobs may have issues given past performance. I can't argue since I don't have experience with them, but technically there is no reason they should given the same kernel+libc. In any case, we haven't tried them yet and so it is inaccurate to make any sort of definite statement about their usability. It's not as if open source software doesn't have stability issues that are impossible to track down, speaking as someone who at one point in his life spent half a year trying to make a particular, fully open source, filesystem implementation stable enough for production use and failed (not for lack of trying or competence).
I used the nvidia and amd blobs as an analogy in an argument about open source vs blobs. What I specifically did *not* do is equate the engineering complexity of their GPUs with Mali. You know why? Because that would've made me sound a complete idiot. Mali is to those GPUs as a Trabant is to a Veyron. As an aside, I run open source drivers for amd (my desktop) and nvidia (my laptop) exclusively and like them better, although I don't really do anything particularly demanding. I would certainly consider them good enough and that's a much more difficult problem than Mali. In any case, we will have blobs available and there's a decent chance they will work.
There are lots of unknowns and variables at play and I certainly share everyone's concerns about the open source side of things, but I see no factual and logical support for claiming that this board is a definite no go for any type of hardware acceleration at any time and under all possible circumstances.
-p