On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 12:26:19PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Oct 2017 21:44:14 -0500
> Nate Bargmann <n0nb@???> wrote:
>
> > I just received a Olimex OLinuXino MICRO (A20) board yesterday and
> > have been playing with it. It works just fine with the Olimex
> > provided Debian Jessie.
>
> Danger Will Robinson!
>
> My research shows that Olimex OLinuXino MICRO (A20) has an Allwinner
> bios, and any web search shows clearly that Allwinner is a serial GPL
> violator.

Allwinner the company indeed doesn't care the slightest about providing
drivers or obeying GPL -- they provide blobby ancient kernels which are then
used by vendors of some Android junk.

But, there's a bunch of individuals who write mainline drivers and DTs for
Allwinner SoCs, and, especially recently, do some great work here. This
work is in some areas quite incomplete, but the situation is better than
typically in the ARM world.

Rule of thumb 1: "consumer" tablets/etc bad, developer boards good.
Rule of thumb 2: a near-mainline tree works if and only if it was pushed
by Icenowy. Somehow, an almost identical tree pushed by others always fails
to do what it's supposed to fix (be it USB, -emac, -dwmac, etc) while her
tree works perfectly.

Meow!
-- 
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ We domesticated dogs 36000 years ago; together we chased
⣾⠁⢰⠒⠀⣿⡁ animals, hung out and licked or scratched our private parts.
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ Cats domesticated us 9500 years ago, and immediately we got
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ agriculture, towns then cities.     -- whitroth on /.