I think what OP wanted is usable NUC alternative on ARM (popularity is the result of that and is really proportional), so little ARM hardware is tolerably compatible with Linux (be it GPU driver, network driver, bootloader or whatever else cr*p ARM hardware makers keep to themselves), unlike NUCs which is actually really nicely compatible with Linux.
There's a little truth to that, but it also overlooks the huge effort the Pi Foundation has made to foster a community, which I think is the one thing the Pi team do that other board manufacturers simply haven't come close to matching.
I'd personally argue it's the work of the Pi Foundation that has lead to the boards success more so than the boards themselves, which to be honest are increasingly pretty under powered compared to almost all rivals and have very long intervals between upgrades. It has probably also helped that the Pi Foundation is a charity promoting CS education in schools, rather than a commercial enteriprise.
I think I didn't overlook it, Linux already has a huge community, they had to roll their own (community) because they weren't compatible enough, this is better than none, but not as good as it could be.
The dominant player in this instance is insisting on using chipsets that are effectively obsolete when compared to the competition.
As a result, the community that they command continues to work on supporting this obsolete hardware, rather than newer hardware.
Network effects exist here just like in many other industries.
If ARM manufactures want to get serious about devices for enthusiasts, hobbits and Linux users, they need more UEFI+ARM solutions that can boot plain old Linux or Windows 10 ARM.
Easily unlockable with WPInternals :)
> only the dead Windows phones
Marvell/SolidRun MACCHIATObin, SoftIron Overdrive, even the old Gigabyte boards with APM X-Gene have both U-Boot and EDK2 (TianoCore) firmwares available. I'm not even talking about big servers (ThunderX) :)
Heck, U-Boot itself can run EFI binaries, with network access for netbooting even — and it's good enough for FreeBSD/aarch64 to not even consider non-EFI booting methods.
https://penguindreams.org/blog/review-clearfog-pro/
Their support is terrible and they only have a 14 day refund window.
if it's an eval board, then do they provide schematics which are typical of other eval board producers?
Having the schematic might aid in getting things working assuming the MAC <-> PHY circuitry supports what you want to do.
To be fair I've yet to see a good ARM manufacturer and they'd all deserve a "fuck you".
Not leaked, entirely official: http://opensource.rock-chips.com ("Hardware Support" section)
And instead of dumps, they have proper git commits! https://github.com/rockchip-linux/kernel/commits/release-4.4
And lots of upstream linux commits with @rock-chips.com addresses.
Not sure what would be in a "secret 2nd part"… the only thing I can think of that's missing from "Part1" is the display system. But there is a driver in mainline Linux for that https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/gpu/dr...
Rockchip has the source of all the things on their GitHub, and a ton of commits in mainline Linux.
If you do a search for Apollo Lake NUC or SBC (6-12W) you'll get dozens of results. The followup Gemini Lake boards are also starting to appear and it looks like there's even a 4.5W Core-M Kaby Lake SBC coming out (LattePanda Alpha - ridiculously overpriced for general use IMO considering you can get 15W 8250U NUCs for less).
Gigabyte, Zotac, Asus and tons of Chinese OEMs all sell 15W U processor NUCs (as well as Apollo Lake options).