[trome]

Yet they have the best mainline driver support, with a fully open VPU driver. Not saying they did any of that mind you, but they at least put the docs out there and eventually posted their BSP on github under GPLv2, so their changes could be updated & mainlined.

[justabystander]

> Yet they have the best mainline driver support, with a fully open VPU driver.

It is not fully open. (http://linux-sunxi.org/CedarX). Partial code was published a year and a half ago, but the video engine still isn't supported. Their GPUs are Mali, as well, which is still a large obstacle in running a modern kernel.

Not to mention that all the code they published was as code dumps, some was under unclear licensing, and it's never on a remotely modern kernel, so it requires heavy porting. But yeah, they did release the code after years of complaints about GPL violations.

Giving a company credit for community efforts is kind of misleading.

[trome]

Uhh, if you want a bad experience from a closed source blob, CedarX is your go to. Cedrus is the fully open VPU driver I was referring to, with H265, VP8 and H264 support.

http://linux-sunxi.org/Cedrus

Mali is still closed source, but GPUs in general are in a poor state for open driver support. Luckily you don't need GPU drivers to bring up Xorg on HDMI on Allwinner chips, so unless your playing video games, it is a non-issue.

Their code dumps they have cleared up the licensing on as of late, Tyle from Allwinner did make clear that everything that isn't explicitly licensed in the file itself is under GPLv2, and that that was Allwinner's original intention. The fact that they are ancient BSP kernels is sucky, but the community is making these sub-$1 SOCs run circles around the other SBCs.