A few years ago I tried switching off Raspberry Pi's after getting fed up with all the proprietary Broadcom nonsense and SD card (un)reliability. Specifically to the OrangePi. Wow the experience was terrible and back to Raspberry it was.
Recently doing another project and ran into the same limitations on the pi4. This time tried the NanoPi m4v2. Wow is it amazing. Native PCIe slot with a NVMe/SATA/USB3 riser hats are fantastic: https://www.friendlyarm.com/image/catalog/description/M4v2_e... - with the SATA hat you can build the equivalent of Synology DS918+ NAS for 1/10th the price.
Won’t be going back to Raspberry. Specifically this is for the use case of a few hundred SBC's deployed in the field for commercial/light industrial - but if you’re a casual Raspberry user do reevaluate the NanoPi. (edit: or the OrangePi apparently, see below!) I’ve found the Raspberry Pi software support to be an ocean wide and a frisbee deep. For anything more involved than a casual weekend project you’re going to have to bushwhack either way.
I wouldn't call that full at all. That matrix doesn't show full support for any of the listed SoCs, and some of them are missing some pretty critical things IMO.
And other things raise big red flags for me, like:
> sunxi-musb driver lacks DMA support (with current driver, USB gadgets are limited to PIO, limiting speed to 10MiB/s and causing large CPU)
That... seems like a pretty big deal for anyone who wants to do anything with USB.
It's also telling that it appears that all the upstreaming efforts seem to be community-driven, which is an even bigger red flag to me; the main page of the wiki you linked calls out Allwinner for their hostile attitude toward open source and the GPL[0]. It's fantastic that such a community has formed and works hard to fill in the gaps, but I'm not sure I want to (for example) build a NAS out of an OrangePi when I'm not confident that in 5-10 years I'll be able to run a future-current OS and kernel on it.
The RPi's support isn't perfect, and not everything has been upstreamed, but most of the critical components are, and everything else is either in progress or at least has an out-of-tree open source driver.
Rockchip generally cooperates with Linux driver developers. The last time I checked, Linux-SUNXI was still stuck reverse engineering everything because Allwinner is actively hostile to driver developers. Has that changed?
I got excited for a minute, and then I looked into the m4v2, and their software support just feels... hacky? Like, they support several flavors of Ubuntu, and a... (at the time they released it last fall) 2 year old version of Android?
I guess the question here is one I have with every non-RPi board: if the company behind NanoPi disappears tomorrow, can I continue to run a current version of a distro, forever, using a vanilla Linux kernel? If not... I'll pass, thanks.
While the RPi Foundation has their own fork of Debian and the Linux kernel, you can run stock Debian with a stock kernel on it just fine, and some of the missing drivers are being upstreamed all the time. The community has built images based on various other distros as well.
I recently went through the difficult process of taking an old (commercial) NAS that was running Debian squeeze and an ancient 2.6.31 kernel, and upgrading it to Debian buster and a 5.6 kernel. I was incredibly lucky that a hobbyist had upstreamed support for its hardware a bunch of years ago. If it hadn't been for that, I would have been stuck. I expect that sort of thing from a commercial appliance, but for a board I'm buying for its hackability, I expect to not be tied to the company that makes it for software updates.
Thanks for that. I've been eyeing the FriendlyArm boards for a while. I've already got a NanoPi Neo2 (and a spare) because I wanted to run WLAN Pi[1 2].
Good to hear that the M4V2 lives up to its billing.
I also have a few Orange Pis. For me the sweet spot for them is in low power ethernet connected: the Orange Pi One. Maybe as a GPS-based NTP server, or some such.
Recently doing another project and ran into the same limitations on the pi4. This time tried the NanoPi m4v2. Wow is it amazing. Native PCIe slot with a NVMe/SATA/USB3 riser hats are fantastic: https://www.friendlyarm.com/image/catalog/description/M4v2_e... - with the SATA hat you can build the equivalent of Synology DS918+ NAS for 1/10th the price.
Won’t be going back to Raspberry. Specifically this is for the use case of a few hundred SBC's deployed in the field for commercial/light industrial - but if you’re a casual Raspberry user do reevaluate the NanoPi. (edit: or the OrangePi apparently, see below!) I’ve found the Raspberry Pi software support to be an ocean wide and a frisbee deep. For anything more involved than a casual weekend project you’re going to have to bushwhack either way.