Support and documentation was non-existing last time I looked.
Has this changed recently? Is there mainline support for AllWinner now or is this still a copy/paste crapfest with branches and huge patchsets?
That said, upstream support for AllWinner parts has come a long way and continues to improve. I wouldn’t mind using them in certain projects.
However, anyone who absolutely needs good documentation and SoC support needs to stick with a vendor that emphasizes openness and good documentation. NXP i.MX is the safe choice.
I wish the HW companies either document their devices or pay someone who understands software to work on it instead just releasing nearly working prototypes and then continuing to another project abandoning HW with old kernels.
I got burned by AllWinner once and will not buy devices using them unless I have a very good reason. :)
They're not going to be unnecessarily reinventing wheels, which should mean we're already half there in these new chips being well-supported by mainline kernel[0].
Still better than Broadcom... at least you can find the (very long) datasheets for a lot of their SoCs.
Never build a product around chips you can’t access anyway. Using the Broadcom Raspberry Pi modules is a great option if, and only if, the features you need are already well supported and documented.
Have to chuckle at this one. I worked for a large company that actually got support from Broadcom for a newer part family (StrataGX). The support was dismal. You'd ask an FAE questions, they'd shrug, if you pressed hard enough (and got your executive team in the loop) you'd get an "answer" from the factory which was usually a pile of badly commented Verilog excerpts under NDA. Thanks but no thanks.
Oh and that one time we did get sample code it was a dump of someone's development directory, including project files for another company (you're probably have one of their machines in your office right now). That was fun.
Also, their requests to plug in "logic analyzer" on the PCI-E bus between host CPU and their chipset in finished product where everything was using BGA soldered parts - yeah...
I believe the only reason everything they share with you is under NDA so you don't go and publicly tell how bad they really are. They are like Boeing to me, but I yet have to see their MAX-like mistake.