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Comment by Gys | Hacker News Reader

Good points, but what I like is the C.H.I.P. is VERY open:

http://makezine.com/2015/07/22/with-linux-and-creative-commo...

Indeed, still no sign of Broadcom releasing the full datasheets for RPi's SoCs... AllWinner on the other hand has been far more open with that.

Is there a clear winner in this ranking ? Broadcom have released some documentation on the RPi's GPU while AllWinner have used 3rd party IP that they can't document ({Mali,PowerVR} and Ethernet).

Arguably there is - you can boot these AllWinner chips using entirely open source code, whereas you need a binary blob to boot the Pi at all and the license agreement forbids you from using it on non-Pi Broadcom hardware. Also, the USB interface on the Pi is third party IP from Synopsis that - last time I checked - they can't document, it's incredibly buggy, and Ethernet goes through it too. (Whereas the AllWinner USB host interface is standard EHCI, just like an ordinary PC.)

AllWinner's Ethernet peripheral is also directly connected to the CPU bus, which makes for a huge difference:

http://hardware-libre.fr/2014/06/raspberry-vs-banana-hardwar...

(Look at the network benchmark in particular.)

But how open is it to other open source OS kernel besides Linux? For example, would they send a pre-release boards to FreeBSD or OpenBSD "kernel hackers" if there was interest?

Though it may not be intentional the article seems to have a strong Linux bias.

I want more hardware like this and I always use open source software, but I may not necessarily choose to run Linux. Nothing against it, simply personal preference. I would like to see hardware that can run a variety of kernels.

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