[elcritch]

Caveat emptor, you get what you pay for as the Linux support for the Allwinner H2/H3’s that power the OrangePi and NanoPi boards are hit and miss at best especially for the WiFi chips. Up until recently you had to either use a somewhat sketchy ancient fork of a Linux 3.x branch that wasn’t maintained or patch the mainline kernel.

The folks over linux-sunxi.org have been doing good work bringing various Allwinner SoC support to mainline Linux. Particularly the EMAC (ethernet) driver looks to be merged soon [1]. The driver for the XR819 WiFi chipset still appears to be up in the air, though good patchsets can be found for it [2].

The last I used the WiFi driver for the Allwinner H2+ SoC earlier this year on the (equivalent) NanoPi Neo boards it was regularly dropping packets. I suspected it was causing issues with other WiFi clients as well but couldn’t figure out how to test that. Still it’s a decent little SoC and both the OrangePi’s or NanoPi’s are handy little SBC’s that I’d use for a project that needed basic WiFi support. If anyone’s good with WiFi drivers and wants to help make it more solid the XR819 driver could use some TLC. It’s outside my expertise though.

1: http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort 2: https://www.cnx-software.com/2016/11/10/allwinner-h2-linux-a...