[mavkhimenia]

Each approach has it's advantages. Navio was built to serve as a Linux platform for APM which provides more processing power than microcontroller platforms - it's useful for advanced flight algorithms (for example, a lot of new features of APM asuch as EKF are not supported on older APM hardware) and the level of integration between payload apps can be much higher than on two modules with serial link.

[georgemcbay]

Yeah this is a good point, if you are tightly integrating the linux bit to the flight controller bit you will get some benefits here, I was focusing primarily on the topics other people keep mentioning like compressed video feeds which don't require that sort of integration.

It is certainly an interesting project, though personally I'd be more apt to buy/build a BeagleBone Black cape to achieve this sort of thing over a Raspberry Pi board.