Allwinner manufactures ARM-based chips used in tablets, TV boxes, and other low-power devices. While most of those products ship with Google Android software, developers have been porting Ubuntu and other Linux-based operating systems to run on devices with Allwinner chips for years, and the chip maker has been providing some source code and documentation to help.
Now Allwinner is going a bit further by joining Linaro as a founding member of the Linaro Digital Home Group.
Linaro is a non-profit working to bring Linux to ARM-based hardware and the team offers builds of Android, Ubuntu, and OpenEmbedded for a variety of ARM-based systems and chipsets.
Allwinner’s not exactly the first chip maker to join Linaro. ARM, AMD, Broadcomm, Freescale, HiSilicon, Marvell, Qualcomm, Samsung, and STMicroelectronics are all listed as members.
But as Allwinner prepares to launch its first octa-core processor, it’s interesting to see the company commit to open source development.
Too nice !! Hope Allwinner will continue to make good SoCs and continue in openness and cooperation direction, this will make the difference :).
Sounds good. I hope something comes of it.
Here’s a list of things that need attention:
https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Work_In_Progress
Looks like they are the first of the cheap Chinese ARM SoC vendors to join Linaro. It’s a start.
I note though that Calexda is still listed as a member, even though they hit the deadpool almost two months ago.
What’s the point when the GPU is not open source.
Yeah, it’ll be the same problems as with the Rockchip.
Rockchip joined Linaro?
Also most Rockchip SOCs I’ve come across use MALI with the exception of some old ones using Vivante. Both of which d not have official open source drivers but rather robust reverse engineering efforts
Efforts != results which are lacking and way behind harware release schedules. Yeah, I’m whining about the super poor and lame arm ecosystem. One can hope this gets better with the 64bit arm stuffs coming out…but I’ll probably get better results hoping for getting a unicorn as a pet.
Allwinner has released everything they can. Their GPUs are licensed from ImgTec and ARM so they can’t release the driver code for them.