[clug] ARM devices with complete upstream support

[Chris Smart]

Every week there's a new cute little ARM device, but almost all use some
ancient fork of the Linux kernel and U-Boot, rendering them less than
ideal (well useless, IMO).

So it was the case with Xunlong's Orange Pi devices when they first
appeared, using AllWinner SOCs.

Now however, there's pretty good support for many of the AllWinner SOCs
upstream (thanks not so much to AllWinner, but to the SunXi open source
community). SunXi has a page showing the current status of the various
AllWinner SOCs[1].

Anyway, I have a ~$15 Orange Pi One with H3 (sun8iw7p1) SOC (Cortex-A7
Quad-Core) and was able to build upstream U-Boot and Linux support for
it. If that interests you, feel free to take a look at my blog[2] post.

They have a few different devices based on the H3 SOC, some that have
wifi and others Gb Ethernet, etc.

I'm not sure how well all the other onboard peripherals work, but for me
I'm interested in a headless device with completely open and upstream
supported bootloader and kernel.

By comparison, while Raspberry Pi devices have recent upstream support,
they still require proprietary blobs from Broadcom in order to boot :-(

Another interesting device that's coming is the C.H.I.P Pro[3] from
NextThing Co. They are really making an effort to have complete support
for their GR8 SOC upstream, which is really admirable. Most patches have
been submitted and will hopefully land in 4.10 (missed the 4.9 merge
window). We'll see.

The C.H.I.P itself[4] is interesting, the R8 SOC (based on AllWinner A13
SOC) is quite well supported, with the exception of the NAND - which
makes it pretty useless as it has no SD support.

[1] http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matrix

[2] <https://blog.christophersmart.com/2016/10/23/building-and-booting-upstream-linux-and-u-boot-for-orange-pi-one-arm-board/>

[3] https://getchip.com/pages/chippro

[4] https://getchip.com/pages/chip