I don't understand why they go through so much effort to churn out these boards that are made useless by lack of upstreaming.
Oh, wait, because idiots like me keep buying them and finding this out too late. Thanks for saving me $20 this time.
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. :(