Linux support concerns

[nomadewolf]

By 'a bit of dev and elbow grease' you're definitely being optimistic. There's absolute no guarantee on that department. While it is entirely possible, it doesn't mean anything else. We just need to wait and see.

Allwinner's uboot booting into an Allwinner 3.0.x kernel with a linux rootfs is definitely just a matter of doing the work. Getting a mainstream distro image from that is just a matter of dealing with things that depend on kernel > 3.0.x like systemd. This is not a matter of opinion, it is a fact that inevitably follows from technical understanding of what's required for that. If the Allwinner blobs work, this same setup gives you acceleration. If they, for some mysterious reason, work in android but not in linux, it might get tricky (or not).

I'm Russian, so I can't possibly be an optimist - it's entirely alien to our national character It's also fatal in engineering. I never said it'll take a couple of hours to do the above, just that it is entirely doable with a reasonable amount of work because it's technically possible and not rocket surgery in the grand scheme of things.

And though the AMD/Nvidia GPUs are on a completely different level of complexity, at least on the AMD side there is documentation and cooperation and code contribution. And that is a BIG deal and a big difference.

No argument there, but this is ARM IP iiuc and, if so, not going to happen.

As for using an older kernel, no i'm not so square that i wouldn't use a kernel 'just' beacause it is old. But with age come the bugs and more importantly security flaws. So yeah, it is a showstopper for me, on account of security concerns which is a serious issue, at least for me.

I made a very extensive post on what 3.0.x means for security either in this thread or the dev board request thread.  On a non-multiuser system, it's not a problem at all. In fact, if you're running openwrt say, you're likely running kernel <= 3 (my devices are on 2.6 actually) and sleeping peacefully. It's not ideal, but it is an issue in a miniscule number of cases.

Even if Android didn't use the Linux kernel (which would make the whole thing much more unlikely), there would still be a possibility. Nothing is impossible if there is enough work involved. But we have to factor reality in our judgement: there are a number of good boards out there, with Allwinner SoCs and the same possibility as the Pine64 to have decent Linux support.
Do you know any one that has it?
Why should we believe that it will be any different with the Pine64?

You're making different arguments. Those boards have linux support. Pine64 will have linux support. That is a given. If by 'decent' support you mean mainline uboot + mainline kernel + full hw acceleration all at the same time, I'd say at least not for a while for the first two and possibly never for the latter. I would, however, argue that that would be 'excellent' rather than 'decent' and a very high standard well above the level of support required to make the board useful to a large number of people. Most people want to be able to slap debian on and go do things with it and that should be available in the not too distant future.

That said, myself, i will just wait for the board to come out and see how it goes on the Linux side. And if it goes well, i'll GLADLY buy the 2GB version. I want it to go well. I want to be wrong. That's why i bitch about it here. But (given the facts) i'm sceptic...

Perfectly reasonable attitude wrt waiting. I will, however, keep correcting these 'facts' when they, in fact, are not

-p

You obviously know way more about the Linux kernel than me, and i don't want to be pushy but i don't really think that there is decent support for any other board, or at least for the ones i researched (HummingBoard, Banana Pi, Orange Pi, O-Droid, BeagleBoard, etc) and i do know that the O-Droid actually runs on a Samsung SoC, for instance.
Just saying that neither of them has it.

And by decent support, i mean hardware acceleration that works.

There is the case of the Raspberry Pi 2, but i want at least 2GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0 and a Quad-Core processor that's above the Gigahertz barrier.