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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

It has one of those goddamned AllWinner chips in it, I wouldn't hold my breath on the HDMI or any of the GPU acceleration working in the foreseeable future. Hardware drivers is not their business, nor is releasing docs that might allow someone else to write a driver.

I have a dev board with one of those chips and getting any of the peripheral hardware working turned out to be a complete nightmare. I eventually gave up on it. Hopefully whomever is doing the Ubuntu port knows Mandarin and is living next to the factory in China so he can sneak out some driver specs.

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Looking at the pics there looks like enough space to be able to experiment with other dev boards. I wonder if we can just think of it as a case. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ready Bunny Huang's book on working in China, it sounds like knowing someone who works at Allwinner is in fact the way to go.

Oh! I would hold my breath, because I backed this project: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bootlin/allwinner-vpu-s...

The bootlin group is a awesome collection of embedded linux engineers and they are well known if not one the top of the lines engineers for the Linux-Sunxi community.

This will be big if it pans out. There are tons of SBCs with AllWinner chips that look amazing on paper but are kneecapped by the poor/nonexistent driver support. It's shocking how many ship with Linux distros that support only half of the hardware on the board.

> Hardware drivers is not their business, nor is releasing docs that might allow someone else to write a driver.

Is there a third road to device support? What's the point of selling hardware if you're not going to provide any sort of path to enablement?

This is a question that has puzzled linux devs for a long time.

Why the hell release a linux only device, marketed at the DIY/hardcore user with no, or very limited ways to actually use the damn hardware? (like being stuck on some ancient kernels with 3.24x10^43 remote holes)

Its pretty astonishing, and seems to be primarily driven over paranoia about IP/patents.

After the answer a lawyer is always going to give to the question "Is there legal risk here" is yes, companies arnt going to do better until we demand they do.

I'm sure they release documentation - under NDA - to companies buying this. However the legalese probably makes it impossible to use those documents to release the source to a linux driver.

Hackers like us are not a large market. Those who need a lot of CPUs for something that nobody even realizes has a CPU are ultimately a much larger market.

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