They have dismal linux support. Old kernels; and no releases. Poor video drivers.
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=238060
the current lubuntu image does not even exist.
http://www.orangepi.org/downloadresources/PiPlus2e/2016-06-0...
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=238060
the current lubuntu image does not even exist.
http://www.orangepi.org/downloadresources/PiPlus2e/2016-06-0...
Oh, wait, because idiots like me keep buying them and finding this out too late. Thanks for saving me $20 this time.
Because the board vendor, generally, doesn't know any more about this stuff than you do. They buy an SoC from a manufacturer (Allwinner in this case) and drop it on the board. Whatever "Linux" BSP the vendor provides then gets hacked into form for their product and shipped. They aren't really in any sane position to take maintainership of this code or upstream it on their own.
And going further, Allwinner is themselves just assembling IP blocks from other vendors (companies like ARM and Synopsys) that they don't completely understand. They get a sample driver, drop it in a tree, fix bugs, and ship it.
It's a big mess. The bigger vendors (e.g. Intel and Qualcomm) do a decent job of putting together solid BSPs (even if they don't always play well with the community -- the packages received by board vendors usually work and come with solid docs). The little guys just aren't there yet.
And again, a datasheet from Allwinner is going to just tell you what the instantiation parameters for all the various IPs are. To write a driver for, I dunno, the I2C controller (or whatever, I know nothing about this SoC in particular) you're going to need a Synopsys databook or something.
There's a framework in place for distributing all that stuff between OEMs and first-tier customers. But with the exception of a handful of hardware vendors, no one's ever cared about getting it out to the public.
And no, it is not a "stolen" or "leaked" documentation (I have actually seen such ridiculous claims in the phoronix forum). It is hosted on the Pine64 website with the permission from Allwinner. And the Pine64 people specifically asked Allwinner to remove the misleading "confidential" watermarks from the PDF files.
Allwinner H5 is very new and this Orange Pi PC 2 board is probably the very first piece of hardware using it. But I expect that the H5 documentation will become available in public access shortly. Just like the documentation for the older Allwinner chips. Maybe initially with the "confidential" watermark again, because the Allwinner people are a little bit lazy and don't seem to understand why the open source people are making so much fuss about this.
I don't believe that this sort of business venture requires that much effort. It appears that in essence they only repackage a currently available soc, and hope that the market bites.
The main reason why these small boards come with a quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM is that currently that's precisely the standard for low to mid-end smartphones running Android.
Of course, the people behind the Raspberry Pi foundation do a bit more than repackaging a bare-bones SoC. Hence, they do manage to sell quality products that actually work.
Why can't their be a generic build of Android that will at least boot on every phone, even if there might be some driver issues on different devices? This situation has gone on for so long it is past the point of being a joke. And don't try to tell me that there is a good technical reason why it has to be this way, we're talking about machines that are as powerful as a mid 2000s PC, you can afford the overhead of a bootloader on there.
I think right now they are trying to decide between Device Tree (FDT) and ACPI for ARM, in the mean time nothing gets done and I'm not confident anything will get done until ARM the IP holder itself mandates something.
Now that the processors are powerful enough to replace what would ordinarily run Windows or Linux it's very painful. The Linux code is littered with support files for a bazillion of different boards and hardware platforms.
Every new mainline kernel release includes improvements for Allwinner chips. Older Allwinner chips, such as A10 and A20, are already supported very well. The support for newer chips is progressing nicely, but there is always a bit of delay.
Yes, you can't expect this newly released Orange Pi PC 2 board to be already supported in the mainline kernel today. But maybe half a year later everything is likely going to be much better. And even right now, there should be some sort of a legacy 3.10 kernel available too, so it is not like you can't use the board at all.
... only if you actually need particular features of the CPU. We're running a dozen of these boards with mainline bootloader, kernel, and Xenial.
But they're headless servers. We don't need the GPU, which is the major component lacking support in mainline. You have to run a legacy 3.4 kernel and binary driver for GPU acceleration and OpenGL. :(
I chose to forgo all the cheaper options from China for a recent project, and instead go with (considerably) more expensive Raspberry Pi 3's, because I didn't want to risk the shite software support. I know I'm going to get kernel and firmware upgrades on those boards for a good long while, and that's one less thing I have to worry about.
It's hard to get the benefits of volume when everyone keeps going for the cheaper-right-now board in order to maximize their own short-term benefits. Contributing to the network effect by buying a Pi because it's cheaper and more popular is not exactly the thing that will lead to Broadcom getting rebuffed and having to answer for all their problems.
I'm not making that mistake again.
If not for boards, I just bought this https://www.amazon.com/dp/B019Z8T9J0 complete, passive PC for less $150, it has four Ethernet ports and a HDMI and a Broadwell (not Atom!) CPU. It's rather incredible how cheap PCs gotten.
Edit: Having looked checked for authorized resellers of Raspberry Pis in China, it just got more confusing.
What happened to EGOMAN, which the Raspberry Pi foundation partnered up in 2013 to produce Raspberry Pis? They only have the first model red pi, and they have stopped advertising them. They make waterproof heartrate monitors now.
Seed studio is one of 2 authorized resellers of element14 in China. They're based in Shenzhen. They sell in JPY, but not RMB. How does that work?
The only authorized reseller that actually sells on taobao is Hangzhou Junroc Electronic Technology co ltd. They sell Model 3 B's for 195RMB + 10RMB shipping. Why do Element14 and RS China charge 260RMB? How do they sell these for cheaper than their distributor? Overhead? Aren't they made here?
How does the ODROID2 work? It's 40USD, or 52,800 won in Korea. 52,800 won is 46USD. Granted, there's 16$ shipping for international orders.
Nothing makes sense to me anymore.
For me, that's worth $15 per board.
Unfortunately, the Raspberry Pi 3 sells for over 50€ per board.
The Raspberry Pi zero, in spite of being marketed as a 10€ computer, in practice can't be purchased at all.
Look at http://www.whereismypizero.com/
Always. Everywhere. Wanted 25 units to teach a robot class to some local kids at the Hackerspace. Had to buy 3's instead. Even if I'd placed 25 separate orders, the cost of individual shipping on each vs the cost savings of the combined shipping on the 3's put the price within spitting distance.
Pi zero is an ad. A loss leader. A way to have an answer, any answer, to the flood of $7 Allwinner wonder-boards on AliExpress.
Want to make a micro-computer? Get the RPi 3.
Want to make a robot or drone? Get the RPi Zero.
Actually it looks like there are quite a few Allwinner devices listed (look for sun__...)
Next Thing says the C.H.I.P. (or at least the C.H.I.P. Pro) runs mainline Linux, but that's not really comparable to the current Raspberry Pi.
As for the lubuntu image, anyone can take any ARM Linux distribution rootfs and combine it with the Linux kernel, built for Allwinner hardware (both mainline and legacy kernels exist). You can find a lot of tutorials at https://linux-sunxi.org
But if you are not a very experienced user, I strongly suggest you to try something like the armbian distribution first.
Unpatched ancient kernels are the future of IoT botnets.
* OS and scheduler v/s low-level partially documented SDK
* 2GB RAM v/s 100s of KB in ESP8266
* 16GB Flash v/s couple of MB Flash on ESP8266
* All other goodies: 4USB ports, Audio/Video, HDMI, Camera, SATA, IR
* 15$ v/s 5$
A good reference of what you can expected can be found here:
http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort
Of course it takes time to clean it up into a mainlineable state. Some years ago I got a "Cubietruck" (A20) and it was somewhat disappointing - the gigabit ethernet (which was the selling point for me) only got to only about double of 100Mbit, using up one of the two cores. It would also have network connections hang once in a while.
This spring I dusted it off and managed to install the latest mainline kernel, and with the exception of onboard NAND (not really necessary since it has SATA), everything I care about works perfectly. I get proper gigabit without CPU stress, and everything is rock stable.
tl;dr: it's worth looking at older devices of they fit your need