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> I ended up choosing the Allwinner A33; it’s an older MPU that came out in 2014. Tablet manufacturers used it in their Android devices, and since Android uses Linux, we should get good mainline support.

Not quite. Mainlining ARM chips tend to be a demanding task, and the not-so-widespread A33 is still a work in progress

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Do yo know why this is the case? Due to integrated peripherals? Or is there something particularly incompatible about the ARM architecture?

I think there's a fair amount of ARM that's different about each implementation.

eg: early boot - initialization of hardware is timing/order dependent

ARM SoCs are complex and often undocumented to anyone outside the company making them. The arch is fine, but many drivers are needed e.g. for clocks (and a lot of reversing has to be done). Having said that, downstream (Android) kernel will probably be fine for a simple use case such as this

Looks well enough supported, looking at the DT files in Linux.

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