Hi,

A31 was always a pretty marginal affair for Allwinner. I doubt that they 
made much money off of it. A23 should've been a wake-up call for us, but 
we seemed unable to get much going with it. With A33 and A80 happening 
now, and with Olimex doing an A31 device, and with development boards 
becoming available for A80 we realy do need to change our act.

We just aren't going to be able to support these devices with our 
sunxi-3.4 kernel. Period.

But... It is also mighty important that we provide straightforward 
device support for devices based upon the newer chipsets.

For one, the fact that we can quickly grab a fex and easily support 
previously unknown devices is what put us apart from other ARM projects, 
it is why we are thriving today. By having lowered the threshold to 
support any random android device, we have kept a steady flow of new 
users up, and we have seen many people contribute who would've otherwise 
just moved on to play with something else.

With our sunxi-3.4 we have also significantly lowered the threshold for 
mainline u-boot/kernel usage, and thus mainline u-boot/kernel 
development.

We have no other option but to realize that we need to do more than 
sunxi-3.4 does today. We need to start using the SDKs more. Not that i 
am stating that sunxi-3.4 should be deprecated, it should still be the 
default kernel for A10,A13,A10s and A20. But we have to start using the 
SDKs more for A31(s), A23, A33 and A80 and all chips going forwards.

I have already been working sunxi-tools/meminfo to help us collect dram 
controller information off of the newer platforms. This will allows us 
to create device specific dram controller parameters in future, when 
Allwinner finally provides us with the information needed there. This 
information should be gathered, for now, in sunxi-boards, probably under 
a to be created meminfo directory.

The next step is create SoC specific Manual Build howtos, following the 
original on our wiki. This should point to specific branches in our 
sunxi u-boot and kernel trees, branches which contain SDK kernels with 
minimal diffs to the kernel release they are based on. We can pack fixes 
on top of that, and if someone is really bored, they could go port those 
changes to other kernels/u-boot versions. We will need to figure out how 
to hack the dram timing into the provided boot0 binaries, so that useful 
SD cards can be created (amongst others). But this should be a stop gap, 
as Allwinner should provide us the necessary information to add proper 
u-boot support.

With this, we diverge from our old mode of working, but we have very 
little option at this point. We need go get general device support going 
again for newer SoCs, we need to get proper linuxes replacing androids 
on newer devices.

Chen-yu has already been writing an SDK build howto 
(http://linux-sunxi.org/SDK_build_howto). I should soon start working on 
A23_Manual_build_howto. It's been 9 months since i got A23 that tablet, 
and it is high time that things start rolling properly on these devices.

The NDH and existing device pages will be adjusted to point to the 
respective build howtos. And i hope that soon we will get some 
enterprising individuals writing up the missing howtos.

Thanks,

Luc Verhaegen.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"linux-sunxi" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to linux-sunxi+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Reply via email to