[newbie] Why Rock64 can't run native ARM Linux distro out of the box

[imjtrial@gmail.com]

Dear all, 

why can't ARM SBC like Rock64 just run native ARM distro like openSUSE out of the box like x86 does?

Even Raspberry pi 3 can run openSUSE native ARM image. I have the impression that other native ARM images in future are not guaranteed.

May I know why this is the situation while ARM cpu has huge market share and ARM devices are everywhere....

Why so much effort has to put on OS layer....

Is could improve this and just have ARM SBC run any ARM distro out of the box like any junk x86 ones does.

Thanks

[elatllat]

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.

[tllim]

There is such effort and this is why you spot a SPI Flash on all ROCK64 board which has yet not been used. Once the EFI implementation on SPI Flash bring up on next two months, user will able directly use the ARM64 OS build that release directly from various OS companies. Please note that this project takes several months, even up to a year to mature. The target is in near future, there is no need to keep creating individual OS builds for different Linux OS which is time and resource hogging.