Bootlin Wraps Up Feature Development On The Allwinner Cedrus VPU Driver

[pabloski]

I heard RPI zero is great if you want to run multi-threaded ARMv7 binaries.

If you are building a smart doorbell, you don't need ARMv7, multithreading/processing, etc... You just need to encode video and audio in h264 and send it to the hub. And the RPi Zero is perfect for the role. Also, it has software support for the encoder, so you can really use it.

The other boards give you nothing. You have a h264 encoder but you cannot use it. So you are forced to use the cpu for encoding ( are you really saying it is better this way? ) and, if you are lucky, you have neon instructions to help.

[caligula]

Yeah but this doesn't justify the deplorable state of affairs in regard to other SBCs. I buy a board and cannot use it to its full extent, because there is no opensource support? And the closed source support is horrible.

FWIW, according to this page the open source support is pretty good for some chips, but you'll need a recent kernel, not a LTS one: http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlin...#Status_Matrix

Looking at that table, you'll mostly face problems if you need MsgBox (whatever that is), CVBS, or HDMI audio. TBH, I wouldn't use these on desktop (obviously, if you just recently finished with video support, what can you expect?). But e.g. some people who bought the Nintendo classic edition say that the Allwinner chip is pretty much fully supported. Some tablet users run Linux on A33. The affordable Orange Pi boards run quite well they say. So, YMMV.

[caligula]

Can you really use these SoCs to do something in the real world? Yet you can do it with a simple RPi Zero.

I heard RPI zero is great if you want to run multi-threaded ARMv7 binaries.

[bavay]

If you talking about this issue, it's seems like solution was found.

Well, the said solution is at best just a hacky work around... The power delivery issue remains and every now and then, you end up with extreme filesystem corruption (ie the whole directory and file structure is lost so you can only try to piece together the data you can rescue without knowing which file it belongs to). This is because the controller in the ssd looses power very suddenly (as there is not enough power available so the voltage drops below what it can use) and therefore might leave everything in complete chaos. What this potential patch does, is allow to restart the usb controller (which is already not so bad, because you don't have to reboot the sbc). But if your disk is severely corrupted, this is not enough... I've had several cases where the only viable option was to reformat and restore from a backup. By the way, on my rockpro64, even the pcie <-> sata adapter has voltage regulation problems (it works with one disk but exhibits the exact same failures as soon as more than 1 ssd is connected).

On the other hand, it seems that the voltage regulation on the pi4 is much better than for other sbcs...

[RussianNeuroMancer]

what's the use for displayport when competition doesn't provide videodriver?

Actually KDE and Mate works pretty well even without accelerated rendering. By the way, DisplayPort via USB-C works even without mali or panforst kernel modules, tested on ROCKPro64.

Well, that's kind of an overstatement: the competition produces USB3 with USB-C connectors with unsatisfactory power regulation leading to massive data corruption when connecting some usb3 drives (like an ssd) to the said usb-c. Or the inability to work with usb hubs (butchered usb3 implementation)... Other than that, I'm happy with my sbc!

If you talking about this issue, it's seems like solution was found.

[bavay]

The competition manages to produce SBCs with perfectly working USB-C, some even with DisplayPort Alternate Mode (RockPro64, Orange Pi 4).

Well, that's kind of an overstatement: the competition produces USB3 with USB-C connectors with unsatisfactory power regulation leading to massive data corruption when connecting some usb3 drives (like an ssd) to the said usb-c. Or the inability to work with usb hubs (butchered usb3 implementation)... Other than that, I'm happy with my sbc!

[pabloski]

About that... at least the other board vendors do not pull the DRM shit that the RPi Foundation inflicts on their users, preventing others from making clones of the camera module (well used to, until the HMAC key was leaked by @marcan42 on Twitter).

Plus the non-conforming USB-C issue, and the foundation will not even give a rough timeframe when it's going to be fixed. The competition manages to produce SBCs with perfectly working USB-C, some even with DisplayPort Alternate Mode (RockPro64, Orange Pi 4).

Yeah but this doesn't justify the deplorable state of affairs in regard to other SBCs. I buy a board and cannot use it to its full extent, because there is no opensource support? And the closed source support is horrible.

What kind of joke is this? Holy cow, Sinovoip offers Linux images with the ffmpeg binary ( the one with support for their h264 encoder ) just copied in the /bin directory. No fork of repos. Nothing. And obviously you cannot patch the upstream ffmpeg, because maybe you want/need the ffmpeg libraries ( to link with your program ).

[OneTimeShot]

PiCamera is a separate product to the RPi.

There are no competitors to the RPi who properly support OpenSouce. Heck one of the ones you listed (OrangePi) couldn’t even come up with a name that wouldn’t confuse customers as to the manufacturer, for some reason.

[pal666]

The competition manages to produce SBCs with perfectly working USB-C, some even with DisplayPort Alternate Mode (RockPro64, Orange Pi 4).

what's the use for displayport when competition doesn't provide videodriver?

[chithanh]

And yet people ask me why I prefer the RPi to all the garbage

no MIPI CSI support, etc...

Can you really use these SoCs to do something in the real world? Yet you can do it with a simple RPi Zero.

About that... at least the other board vendors do not pull the DRM shit that the RPi Foundation inflicts on their users, preventing others from making clones of the camera module (well used to, until the HMAC key was leaked by @marcan42 on Twitter).

Plus the non-conforming USB-C issue, and the foundation will not even give a rough timeframe when it's going to be fixed. The competition manages to produce SBCs with perfectly working USB-C, some even with DisplayPort Alternate Mode (RockPro64, Orange Pi 4).