[progbits]

How's the software support for sipeed stuff?

Every time I opted for cheaper clone of beagleboard or RPi I ended up regretting it when I inevitably had to spend hours building custom kernel patches and struggling to get it working reliabily. The more expensive boards usually work out of the box with mainline kernel.

For some that can be worth the extra $50.

[magios]

well, if the soc is the same, thus same cpu, gpu, and npu, kernel and userspace support should be also roughly equal, tho the device tree will differ between the two devices. i do agree that many of these sbc computers have poor initial support and many end up remaining that way. perhaps we should be requiring that mainline linux support, and working drm drivers, for gpu, exist before the product is released.

[progbits]

If it is just device tree that should be less painful, and probably also faster to upstream.

I'm just hesitant to buy one of those without having some 3rd party confirm everything works well out of the box, and the more obscure the device the harder to find such accounts.

[mat_epice]

Who should require it? And how will it be enforced?