WiFi/BT Interface?

[bigmacattack]

What interface type is being used for the WiFi + Bluetooth card? Is it only intended to work with Pine64 manufactured cards, or also 3rd-party cards?

With the Pine64 board having 4K video support, it would be preferable to me to have an 802.11ac + Bluetooth 4.0 BLE option.

For others, Zigbee, 6LoWPAN, AM/FM/DAB etc. might be preferable. What other radios might be possible/will be available?

[tkaiser]

What interface type is being used for the WiFi + Bluetooth card?

The available interfaces are SDIO 2.0 and UART. In case the Pine guys release their schematics you don't have to reverse engineer the connector layout to be able to use any avaiable chip for Wi-Fi/BT.

Please keep in mind: you're both limited by SDIO 2.0 maximum bandwidth and driver support (always remember: The A64 comes with an outdated kernel 3.10 and this won't change anytime soon).

[bigmacattack]

SDIO 2.0? The A64 datasheet says SDIO 3.0 (PG14 Figure 3-1. A64 Block Diagram).

So hopefully something like the BCM4335 (802.11ac + BT 4.0 + FM) or the RS9117 (802.11ac + BT 4.0 + Zigbee) or the 88W8897 (802.11ac + BT 4.0 + NFC) SOCs could be supported?



I see where AllWinner mentions the 3.10 Kernel, but according to the Pine64 wiki here, "64-Bit Version 3.10 will be updated to Version 3.18 in next few months and follow up with kernel Version 4.2"

I wonder where they are getting this?

[tkaiser]

Quoted from the A64's user manual:

• Supports Secure Digital memory protocol commands (up to SD3.0)
  
• Supports Secure Digital I/O protocol commands(up to SDIO2.0) 
  

Regarding the FAQ there are a few things that are somewhat incorrect (for example: GPU has nothing to do with video encoding/decoding).

Regarding the kernel version they either have no idea how Linux development works or it's just marketing. They got an SDK from Allwinner using a heavily patched kernel 3.10.65. It's not a clean patchset they could apply to a forked 3.10.y kernel branch but it's just a huge mess of code. It's completely unrealistic to apply hundreds of thousands commits from the official kernel sources to their Allwinner kernel sources to be sometimes in the future at 3.18 or 4.2.

It works different: new code has to be written from scratch to be able to support the A64 SoC in mainline u-boot and kernel. And then the A64 will be supported partially by kernel 4.x sometimes in 2016 and support will increase from version to version.

They could speed things up if they change their business model (currentlly trying to donate a few free boards to devs and hoping to delegate work) and hire for example free-electrons -- but it will still take a lot of time until a more recent kernel will be useable.

In the meantime the situation with all what they have currently (an Android SDK relying on 3.10.65 kernel) needs also a lot of improvements to avoid the 'linux experience' with Pine64 being just crap: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic...#entry3173