Raspberry Pi 3's BCM2837 SoC Now Supported By Mainline Linux 4.8

[pal666]

the sunxi team is able to produce uboot/kernel for new chinese boards even without any direct funding.

they fund it with their time, it is the only thing which needed for development

The boards are so cheap that nobody can afford paying for driver development.

cheapest rpi is $5

OTOH, the Rpi foundation earns tens of millions and as a non-profit, they should be investing truckloads of money on driver development.

they develop drivers for children in python

Still the pesky sunxi team gives them very tough competition. How come?

lolwut? rpi has one upstream developer which produced mesa driver, allwinner has team which produced zero

[caligula]

No they don't. Unless you are making a total with all they earned till they started businness.

reverse-engineering you mean. They do, in the last 4 years they basically reverse-engineered the whole damn thing apart from boot firmware.

huge amounts of beta-testing does not matter as much as you might think.

Thanks for the clarifications. The raspberries sold over 8 million devices already 6 months ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20160229...-pi-3-on-sale/

$25..35 per device * 8 million is quite a lot. That price doesn't include shipping or taxes. At least in Europe a realistic price for RPI3 is 40+ euros.

Speaking out of your ass much? They do own the hardware they develop for, you can't develop blind.

I should have mentioned, I thought about distro support overall. Each distro and driver project needs the hardware for testing. This quickly becomes a burden as there are already tens of Allwinner A20 models and new models keep piling up. In the RPi land its often sufficient to have 3 boards to support them all.

[wizard69]

not really.

they didn't. other people did it instead

Either they are violating GPL or they are not. If Allwinner isn't developing software then people can't claim they are violating GPL. It is one or the other here.

[starshipeleven]

Thanks for the clarifications. The raspberries sold over 8 million devices already 6 months ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20160229...-pi-3-on-sale/
$25..35 per device * 8 million is quite a lot. That price doesn't include shipping or taxes. At least in Europe a realistic price for RPI3 is 40+ euros.

Shipping or taxes isn't money they can keep for themselves (nor the ridicolous overpricing added by quite a few resellers), also they have expenses of their own to cover (board design/manufacture/whatever/running the foundation) so we don't know how much they actually get of the 25-35 euros per raspi.

Considering that most cheep chinese boards (with comparable connectivity) actually cost more or less the same if not more (usually more), yeah, there isn't much margin right there.

Each distro and driver project needs the hardware for testing. This quickly becomes a burden as there are already tens of Allwinner A20 models and new models keep piling up. In the RPi land its often sufficient to have 3 boards to support them all.

This is nonsense. The hardware support is required to run the SoC (the A20 chip), to support a board you usually just need to add a dtb file with the board configuration. Plus any drivers specific for devices bolted on the board, but on average everything comes from the SoC itself.

Seriously, it isn't much more different than supporting x86 motherboards. once you support the CPU and chipsets it's 99% done for all boards in existence.

[starshipeleven]

Either they are violating GPL or they are not. If Allwinner isn't developing software then people can't claim they are violating GPL. It is one or the other here.

Can you please stop acting like an idiot for a moment? None said Allwinner isn't developing software, and you should be able to use some reasoning to reach a logical conclusion on your own.

If you cannot, I'll tell you.

Allwinner develops 100% closed-source drivers for their SDK they sell to companies making Android tablets and other things with their SoCs. More often than not there are blatant GPL violations. read here http://linux-sunxi.org/GPL_Violations

If there was only Allwinner, their SoCs would have exactly 0 mainline support, period.

Team sunxi is a third party not affiliated with Allwinner that got their hands on hardware manuals that should be covered by NDA (like the one posted above), using them illegally and letting everyone see they have and use them, and are the ones mainlining things in linux kernel.

[chithanh]

Being Chinese cuts both ways, they cannot really retaliate on any NDA or copyright violation done outside of China (and even then it's not hard to get away with it even inside China), for example I can also find EASILY SDKs for Mediatek wifi SoCs for example and I've seen some full SDKs for their mobile SoCs too passing by while I was looking for something else.

In part this, and in part the Mutually Assured Destruction that would ensue if Allwinner tried to take down sunxi.
Otherwise, things which were produced from NDA violations or reverse engineered in questionably clean rooms are typically unfit for kernel inclusion.

[starshipeleven]

In part this, and in part the Mutually Assured Destruction that would ensue if Allwinner tried to take down sunxi.

Like what? Allwinner sells most of its stuff to chinese tablet makers and OEMs. The devboards we run linux on are done with stuff that is resold by third parties because it's not produced in so high quantities to warrant getting anywhere near the 100k SoCs minimum order from Allwinner directly.

Otherwise, things which were produced from NDA violations or reverse engineered in questionably clean rooms are typically unfit for kernel inclusion.

That article talks about copyright violations in the code itself, or a neat trick to copy the code of a closed driver.
In this case they have access to register information, and using that info they make a open driver. Any legal issue will be between sunxi and Allwinner, the kernel won't be at risk.

Plus the obvious fact that international law is a joke even between US and EU, so go figure between CHina and US or wherever sunxi team members are (I think also china, still a pretty large and heterogeneous place to stay).

[chithanh]

That Allwinner only sells stuff to OEMs doesn't matter much to those who would want to sue them for GPL violations. If they can't go after a manufacturer or OEM directly, they will go after their customers. This has happened multiple times in the past with other vendors.

The sunxi devs have access not only to register information but also to the proprietary Allwinner drivers. Plus information from NDA documents may end up as non-verbatim yet infringing copy in the driver code.

That you have difficulties to figure out jurisdiction doesn't mean that a sufficiently determined legal team would.

[starshipeleven]

That Allwinner only sells stuff to OEMs doesn't matter much to those who would want to sue them for GPL violations. If they can't go after a manufacturer or OEM directly, they will go after their customers.

They sell to chinese tablet makers and OEMs, so yeah, untouchable too.

This has happened multiple times in the past with other vendors.

Yeah, like the famous Apple Vs Samsung about tablets with rounded corners. It ended up blocking sales of devices that were basically obsolete already.

The sunxi devs have access not only to register information but also to the proprietary Allwinner drivers.

Everyone has access to the proprietary Allwinner drivers, just give me a crap chinese tablet and I'll extract the blobs from its firmware.

The violations that article was referring to were copying closed-source code by looking at its source under NDA and doing tricks to sidestep the NDA. Sunxi isn't even trying to copy the closed drivers, because they are total underdeveloped shit full of stolen parts.

Plus information from NDA documents may end up as non-verbatim yet infringing copy in the driver code.

No, as the only useful info is register info.

That you have difficulties to figure out jurisdiction doesn't mean that a sufficiently determined legal team would.

By international law, the trial for copyright infringement should happen in the offender's country.
That's why none can do shit to Allwinner (and friends), China courts would laugh at any such trial for obvious self-interest.

And US courts are likely to return the favor if given the opportunity, so any international legal battle is going to become stupid bloodshed pretty quick.

[chithanh]

They sell to chinese tablet makers and OEMs, so yeah, untouchable too.

Allwinner SoCs are not only used in products for the Chinese domestic market. From the RPi competition, Banana Pi, Cubieboard and pcDuino use Allwinner chips. European companies like Archos and Point of View sell Allwinner tablets.

Yeah, like the famous Apple Vs Samsung about tablets with rounded corners. It ended up blocking sales of devices that were basically obsolete already.

Apple sued Samsung for GPL violations? That's news to me. Obviously I meant other cases, some of which can be read at http://gpl-violations.org/. For example, it is likely that the case against the French ISP Iliad later prompted Vodafone to extract source code from its Taiwanese OEM Arcadyan for the EasyBox 904 broadband routers when the GPL violation was pointed out to them.

By international law, the trial for copyright infringement should happen in the offender's country.

I take you are not familiar with the case of Kim Dotcom.