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Comment by stuartaxelowen | Hacker News Reader

What's with the "no NDA required"? Who requires NDAs for their datasheets?

Every chip vendor I've dealt with, from Amlogic to Allwinner to Freescale, requires a signed NDA for full documentation. Public documentation is usually heavily redacted.

The GR8 seems to be a rebadged Allwinner chip, and the no-NDA datasheet seems to be next to useless, to be honest.

One of the good things with the Chinese companies is that the datasheets will usually make it out into the public if the chips get popular enough. A byproduct of the "Gongkai" ecosystem:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297

> "The GR8 seems to be a rebadged Allwinner chip"

It could be, but reading up on the features of the C.H.I.P. Pro it supports mainline Linux. I assumed this meant without blobs. Is there mainline support for any Allwinner chips?

Many A20 features are in mainline kernels now, although sunxi-3.4 is still recommended for full hardware support.

http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matrix

EDIT: The GR8 is specifically called out on this page as having mainline support from kernel 4.9.

I've been running bananian with the 4.4 kernel on my bpi-R1 (A20 SoC) and everything seems to be working fine. Although I don't use it for anything graphical (it's a networking/storage/server device.) Can't say how much it's relying on binary blobs though.

Sadly Allwinner did zero of that mainlining.

The GR8 is an AllWinner R8 with RAM in a single piece of resin. They are targeting product builders, see the section:

> Powered by a chip you can actually buy. > R8 SoC + 256MB DDR3 > 1 package. 1 price. > $6 in any quantity.

(that's $6 for their rebadged chip.) TBH this looks like not a bad solution for someone looking to board-down a linux capable product. I wonder if the GR8 needs a power mgt chip or if that's integrated into the SoC as well.

Back to your original question, NTC (among others) worked with AllWinner I believe to mainline some of the R8 code and reduce (or possibly eliminate?) binary blobs.

> it supports mainline Linux. I assumed this meant without blobs

Fun fact, there are blobs in mainline Linux. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-libre#History

What do you mean by "full documentation" and "NDA"?

Go to NXP.com, sign up for an online account, and you can download full reference manuals for most of their products. They may hold errata and more low-level/non-user documentation closer to the chest, if your sign-up data is obviously fake or appears to be North Korean your account may not be activated, but it's not the case that you need to have an NDA signed in blood to get manuals.

Many companies. Almost too many to list. This is probably a dig at Broadcom who makes the chip in the Raspberry Pi and usually requires NDAs for their chips. Hell, Broadcom won't even let you buy many of their chips without their permission!

OTOH Broadcom is paying someone to write open source 3D drivers for the chip in the RPi:

http://anholt.livejournal.com/

Pretty much every SOC manufacturer. To protect their intellectual property, they control access to the documents that describe the behavior of their products. Also, if you leak any of their intellectual property, the NDA allows them to sue their lost profits (due to clones of their product) out of you.

It's not every SOC manufacturer. TI and NXP do not require NDAs for their datasheets, only for the security subsystem perhaps.

Do you know if these manufacturers then suffer any more from IP theft because of the more open policy? Or are the NDAs here used more as a 'serious customer' vetting tool so they can concentrate their support efforts towards these customers?

A lot of vendors do for recent processors. You can easily get a z80 datasheet, but not necessarily complete info for a recent ARM SoC.

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