Raspberry Pi Close To Seeing CPUFreq Support

[Bsdisbetter]

I thought that it was only amateurs who wasted their time on the raspberry Pi nowadays, given the widespread availability of MUCH more powerful SBCs.
Not so sure that SUSE-corporate will be excited about having this kind of news--about one of their developers (I assume he's a developer, from his efforts)--spread far and wide.

More powerful, maybe, more costly & vaguely supported, definitely.

[kpedersen]

Where I think that the Pi wins out is that it has a fairly stable supply.
Many other SoCs seem to have quite short supplies and you need to wait quite a while for them to produce more.

Also you can still get hold of a first gen Raspberry Pi. I find this very important. Not every project needs or wants a faster chip. The average lifespan of other SoC providers is absurdly short, suggesting that it is generally all amateur or hobby stuff.

[caligula]

I think it is worth pointing out there are SBCs that are arguably a better value than an RPi, however, the RPi will remain a very enticing option due to the vast community. Even though I tend to buy odroid products, I often find myself using stuff made by the RPi community.

Yes, RPi has great support. E.g. mainline cpufreq before the competitors even considered it.

[Grawp]

I think it is worth pointing out there are SBCs that are arguably a better value than an RPi, however, the RPi will remain a very enticing option due to the vast community. Even though I tend to buy odroid products, I often find myself using stuff made by the RPi community.

Is there any easily obtainable SBC having mainline kernel support with opensource 3D graphic acceleration other than RPi? As far as I know only VC4 and Adreno have kinda complete acceleration support and I haven't seen Snapdragon SBC yet (smartphones excluded).

[andreano]

any easily obtainable SBC having mainline kernel support with opensource 3D graphic acceleration other than RPi? As far as I know only VC4 and Adreno

Have you considered the NXP iMX8M with Vivante GPU? I haven't tried Etnaviv myself, though I did use a Nitrogen6x as my laptop for a while.

I would definitely have bought Boundary Devices' Nitrogen8M had it come out sooner than TechNexion's PicoPi iMX8M with the same SOC. My advice: Don't buy from TechNexion; buy from Boundary Devices! Because they are the ones mainlining at least u-boot and device tree support, occasionally publish build instructions on their blog, and actually spin new Ubuntu images from time to time. And you can get their boards with a decently sized, decent LCD screen!

[campbell]

What exactly am I missing here? Raspbian on a pi 3 already has cpufreq...

[polarathene]

Is there any easily obtainable SBC having mainline kernel support with opensource 3D graphic acceleration other than RPi? As far as I know only VC4 and Adreno have kinda complete acceleration support and I haven't seen Snapdragon SBC yet (smartphones excluded).

ODROID-N2 does from 5.2 kernel onwards as mainline and Panfrost for open-source graphics.

[Bsdisbetter]

Have you considered the NXP iMX8M with Vivante GPU? I haven't tried Etnaviv myself, though I did use a Nitrogen6x as my laptop for a while.

I would definitely have bought Boundary Devices' Nitrogen8M had it come out sooner than TechNexion's PicoPi iMX8M with the same SOC. My advice: Don't buy from TechNexion; buy from Boundary Devices! Because they are the ones mainlining at least u-boot and device tree support, occasionally publish build instructions on their blog, and actually spin new Ubuntu images from time to time. And you can get their boards with a decently sized, decent LCD screen!

If they're anything like the imx6, it will take years to get support. The cubox i4s were stumbling around in the dark for their 1st year. After that it got better but now, for example, they've got no support by kodi because of lack of support by imx.6 vendors, like solidrun. (https://libreelec.tv/2018/09/development-update/)
You can, of course, use librexec, but this just indicates that unlike the RPi, support is not widespread and active. You take the risk with other, albeit better equipped, SOCs that either your particular use will not be supported, will eventually be supported or will be supported but then forgot about in a year or two. This is not the case with the RPi

[torsionbar28]

I thought that it was only amateurs who wasted their time on the raspberry Pi nowadays,

Aren't amateurs the target market of the raspberry pi, and always have been? Students, tinkerers, hobbyists, etc? Have they ever marketed these to any one else, besides amateurs?

Let me guess, you must be a PRO gamer, lol.

[Bsdisbetter]

Aren't amateurs the target market of the raspberry pi, and always have been? Students, tinkerers, hobbyists, etc? Have they ever marketed these to any one else, besides amateurs?

Let me guess, you must be a PRO gamer, lol.

Yes, because involved in some amateur pursuit like maintaining a distro, porting code or being active in the foss landscape is real bad. Not!
100% agree with you.