So unless Rockchip would have proper opensource boot loaders, I would stay miles away since it mostly kills custom automation tasks. Which is unhappy if you try to send debug output shit into it. And it has been very critical couple of times, because I was able to shut down all debug output and use UART for GPS module.
ALLWINNER A64 PRICE FULL
On allwinner I can even build FULL BOOT LOADER from source. But on rockchip it is not possible and it would take a lot of woes to deal with proprietary flashers and flashing to internal memory. And if you need to bring up, say, 20 boards or modules… okay, I would rather write 20 cards with system image I created using “dd” linux command, insert cards to devices and ready to rock-n-roll. Then they have encrypted boot and proprietary code in boot sequence, which is pain. Yet, half of rockchips can’t even boot from SD card (and it makes debugging and investigating wreked system much harder). Recently it started to improve, and some RK3xxx ICs got some mainline kernel support. OTOH, Rockchip isn’t really Linux friendly and hardly counts for anything beyound enterntainment. Yet, in most networked automation tasks allwinner A20 with 1Gb RAM would have enough headroom to do almost anything. There is one thing to know about allwinner: software support somewhat lagging behind. And Olimex got some fancy A20 boards to mess with, I’ve got used to them due to good documentation. No royalty payments shit, no trademarks, no patenrs, etc – 100% safe choice even for “commercial” deployments. Then you can, say, do debootstrap and build some custom Debian image for custom automation task. While it has been initially annoying due to vendor kernels and proprietary boot loaders, now it is mostly works in mainline kernel and u-boot – thanks to Linux Sunxi community! And it has became my choice on various automation and somesuch.
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And android would be a major roadblock most of time if your requirements are beyound enterntainment.Īnd I would agree: Linux Sunxi community ROCKS! I had experience using Allwinner A10 and A20 boards in numbers. And if one needs yet another fancy android tablet or silly TV dongle – just go to shop and buy one?! There is no point to do things like this yourself, unless you got some really custom requirements. Android suxx really hard when it comes to anythings beyond entarntainment – it is completely crippled system where you can’t use most programs and libs from opensource world.