How about developer and OSS friendlyness?

[milo]

How about developing software for the board?

I'm curious if the board would be any good for system development and prototyping. Most of the site focuses on "end user" applications and systems, while I'm only interested in the board as a basis for combined hardware/software development. A few detailed questions that come to mind here:

Can I get the sources for the images and compile them myself?

Is there support for Yocto and OpenEmbedded?


If I configure and build my own mainline kernel for this board, will I still be able to decode video in hardware?

[tkaiser]

If I configure and build my own mainline kernel for this board, will I still be able to decode video in hardware?

LOL! Do you see here a single reference of A64: http://linux-sunxi.org/Mainlining_Effort

Depending on how clever the Pine64 people are you'll be either stuck at 3.10.65 forever or get support in Mainline kernel/u-boot sometimes in 2016 (and if they manage to do the impossible then you'll be able to use HW accelerated video in Linux with Mainline kernel, too   )

[dergeo]

me gustaria poder conectarle modulos GSM y GPRS, es posible?

[tllim]

How about developing software for the board?

I'm curious if the board would be any good for system development and prototyping. Most of the site focuses on "end user" applications and systems, while I'm only interested in the board as a basis for combined hardware/software development. A few detailed questions that come to mind here:

Can I get the sources for the images and compile them myself?

Is there support for Yocto and OpenEmbedded?


If I configure and build my own mainline kernel for this board, will I still be able to decode video in hardware?

This board design intents for hanns on people. We will upload tool chain and related development tools on next few days. Pine A64 doesn't support Yocto or OpenEmbedded yet and we are welcome developer to work on them. For developer that interest on OS porting and contribute back to public, we will provide free Pine A64 board for them.

Regarding build your own mainline kernel and decode video in hardware, this is possible but may takes a lot of work and frustration. This due to some video codec driver may provide as binary only due to confidentiality and patent concern.

[milo]

Okay that's clear, the board will remain a nice toy for some hobbyists, but like other similar board won't be useful for any serious development when that involves actually using the video hardware. As a generic "headless" ARM64 board it'll be very nice though because of its pricing.