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

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 11 January 2020 at 06:49 AM EST. 12 Comments
HARDWARE
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.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week