The Pine64 PineTab Could Soon Be Running Nicely Off The Mainline Kernel

One of the many devices being pursued by the PINE64 crew is the PineTab open-source ARM 64-bit tablet. Thanks to being another Allwinner A64 product and not using any too bleeding edge tech, the PineTab has patches available to get it running off a mainline Linux kernel.

Announced back in 2019, the PineTab tablet is similar to the original Pinebook and features a quad-core Allwinner A64, 2GB LPDDR3, 10-inch 720p display, 64GB eMMC, USB 2.0, and all the other basics.

Posted on Friday were 5 patches that appear to iron out most of the support for the mainline kernel. With the A64 SoC support and other bits already in place, the only work required are adding some DeviceTree bindings, adding the MIPI-DSI panel used, and then it should basically be good to go at least with all key functionality.

Developer Icenowy Zheng wrote, "Thanks to the community's contributions these years, we now have most of the functionalities of the tablet available in this device tree."

If these patches get picked up soon enough, we could potentially see them queued as part of the upcoming Linux 5.6 kernel.