I have 4 ARM Odroid devices, but I'm not going to buy another one. Even though some are advertised as supporting mainline Linux kernels, in practice none do if reliable operation is to be expected.
When you buy an ARM Odroid device, you're tied to Hardkernel's vendor-specific patches and vendor-specific Linux kernel branches. As you would expect, the quality of these patches varies from bad to absolutely terrible. If you visit the Hardkernel forums, you'll see people casually swapping patches to get functionality like USB to "work".
The practice of not even trying to merge with mainline is completely unacceptable, and not only leads to fragmentation but erodes any quality guarantees one can make about systems one builds on top of their products. They're literally running code that the mainstream Linux kernel development community has neither vetoed nor reviewed. It's for that very reason that I will not support them anymore. The ARM Linux ecosystem is bad enough without me subsidizing this sort of behavior.
It's also disappointing to see the Linux kernel community not coming down hard on such endeavors (Linus in particular could enforce the Linux trademark) since they dilute the entire ecosystem and erode quality. Odroid advertises Linux but it's not really running Linux.
Not entirely true. The process is not automagic, because you manually have to search bits from the device tree and put them into the one from mainline kernel. Furthermore fiddling with uboot is often needed. But it's absolutely possible to have rock solid operation with mainline linux. It just lacks the (right) vendor defaults in all sorts of places for now. This is my experience with Allwinner. But since i'm watching that SBC ghetto closely i'm aware of that being the case for the other vendors too, more or less.
And when everything is perfect the device is obsolete, EOL.
G
(edit: reminds me of fiddling with custom ACPI tables because of crappy BIOS on PCs)
When you buy an ARM Odroid device, you're tied to Hardkernel's vendor-specific patches and vendor-specific Linux kernel branches. As you would expect, the quality of these patches varies from bad to absolutely terrible. If you visit the Hardkernel forums, you'll see people casually swapping patches to get functionality like USB to "work".
The practice of not even trying to merge with mainline is completely unacceptable, and not only leads to fragmentation but erodes any quality guarantees one can make about systems one builds on top of their products. They're literally running code that the mainstream Linux kernel development community has neither vetoed nor reviewed. It's for that very reason that I will not support them anymore. The ARM Linux ecosystem is bad enough without me subsidizing this sort of behavior.
It's also disappointing to see the Linux kernel community not coming down hard on such endeavors (Linus in particular could enforce the Linux trademark) since they dilute the entire ecosystem and erode quality. Odroid advertises Linux but it's not really running Linux.