Hi,
On Fri, 17 Jan 2025, Holm Tiffe via cctalk wrote:
I've got 3 pcs. Cubieboard 2 SBC's with the
Allwinner A20 SOC Chip on
them. That's kind of a RaspberryPi SBC with an 2 Code Arm7hf on it.
The boards are equipped with HDMI, USB, Ethernet (100Tx), SATA, SD Card
slot and some 4G NAND Flash Cip on it. RAM is 1 Gbyte, CPU Clock is
996Mhz.
Additionally I've bought some Base Boards for them, that's the DVK521
from Waveshare..contains the Baseboard, an Camera Module OV670, a 7" LCD
with LVDS, a thermo sensor and other things..
Good HW in my eyes, but already outdated.
I wnt to use the boards for some Home/house related stuff, PV, heating,
Light control etc. and for that they should be more than enough.
The Chips even have an graphics accelerator in the SOC.
Now the Problem: as far as I know Allwinner has made some mistake using
gnu/Linux stuff without any respecting the GPL.
Because of that (if no other cause) most of the support Software on the
net seems to be gone. There where some different Linux distributions for
it, (Linaro, Cubieez etc) but most of the stuff isn't available anymore
because of dead links.
I've successfully build an modern Armbian image for them..but have
endless trouble. The Xserver configutres an not existing Video Output,
the LCD is unknown at all and if I manage to switch the X-server to the
HDMI output using xrandr (only with tricks because it needs a session)
the performance is like some old thick glue...
Besides of that I had to fix an already for 8 years known Bug in the A20
Ethernet driver (it simpy has a more modern ethernet Unit as the A10 inside)
that was'nt fixed at all. Armbian has only "community Support" fo those
chips..which means that there is no support at all. If one asks for help
the answer is more or less "find it yourself and provide a patch".
I have an Linaro disk image that seems to be working, but there are some
parts missing. The base distribution seems to be ubuntu 12.04 LTS
(precise Pangolin) for armhf. I can't find a package repository
anymore..(since that's long outdated). I've managed to install ssh by
using an tarball of an ubuntu 12.04 armhf image for another board..and
it works..but sshd is still missing.
There are more modern disk images at
https://mega.nz/folder/ZtwxCCJC#AIYHcTqz-ucjuzKnE9qD7A/folder/t0p2SBQD
but mostly they don't even boot..possibly they using an newer/other uboot
and uboot-envirnonment...
Now the question: Is someone in the world still using those boards and
has disk images/software for them?
Again: I'ts not that much interesting that this is old linux, because
I'll use that only inhouse in the lan, not browsing actual websites..
I'm a BSD guy and not know that much about Linux, especially such things
as configurations for uboot etc. and there is none that I could ask for
such things.
I do use these, but I'm an OpenWrt guy (I've added support for these sunxi
boards into the distro), which has probably less bells-and-whistles than
what you're looking for, but it's being updated and runs recent kernels.
If you want those bells-and-whistles, then indeed your best bet is Armbian
and its community support, whatever state it's in. Debian also has an
armhf target with a limited number of boards supported (the CB2 is in the
list), you can take a look at that too.
I mainly use these boards to a) test and upstream new kernel versions, b)
console-only stuff like running an ADS-B receiver, sensor measurements,
but nothing that goes into the multimedia use case. Also, getting the
flash running on the A10/A20 SoCs IIRC never worked correctly with
mainline kernels due to them being MLC.
Having said that, getting the board to a point where you can use most of
the DVK521's features seems possible, bar the LCD display and the OV7670.
For the Ubuntu release, you might be able to use
old-releases.ubuntu.com,
but unsure if you're going to have a kernel mismatch between what Ubuntu
used and what Linaro used. Bear in mind that these boards were built when
this whole cheap SBC stuff started to take off, with distros taking
different approaches - some have integrated the SDK drivers, some have
worked on mainline drivers, some have bashed Allwinner or other SoC
vendors for better documentation to write better drivers.
Regards,
Zoltan Herpai