Allwinner H2 Linux & Android SDK, and Allwinner XR819 WiFi Driver Released

Really, the only interesting thing in the leaked H2+ SDK is driver/firmware for this new Wi-Fi module (which is not that great compared to 8189FTV as on older Orange Pi boards but will easily outperform every 2.4 Ghz Wi-Fi dongle while consuming less). And there’s also not much need to fiddle around with the horribly outdated 3.4.39 kernel contained in this SDK, better use linux-sunxi community’s 3.4 sun8i kernel (3.4.113 currently and with tons of fixes) or mainline. Already tested Orange Pi Zero with megous’ 4.7 branch (since I failed to get his 4.8 and 4.9 branches working). Combined with… Read more »

@tkaiser
In 4.8, there’s is a new sunxi-ng clock driver. You may need to enable it in comparison to 4.7 kernel configuration, to make the newer kernels work. Otherwise, everything else is quite similar to 4.7.

Also, 4.9 branch contains HDMI driver from http://moinejf.free.fr/opi2/index.html, which is pretty exciting, because that means a limited desktop experience with mainline kernel on H3.

@megous
Thank you, highly appreciated. I first tried 4.9-hdmi and got it working but only when I used wrong DT (dvfs then failing). With correct DT used we ran in freezes with both 4.8 and 4.9.

@Benjamin
Well, I’m not really qualified since I don’t care about Mali at all (since it’s only necessary for OpenGL ES stuff and where’s the use case for this? Retro gaming mostly, at least that’s what http://orange314.com/RetrOrangePi is about, the only known use case for Armbian overclocking Mali400 on H3 devices 😉 )

But if I understood correctly the Mali kernel driver bits can be used with mainline kernel (out-of-tree) as long as the userland blobs are available (which might be the case or not, some are floating around but with unclear license).

Orange Pi Zero booting with latest mainline kernel version: http://sprunge.us/LSUb (well, not that surprising since fortunately H2+ is just a H3 without 2 features so all the hard work done by linux-sunxi community within the last year can be used directly for H2+ too)

@Jerry

Thats pretty pathetic. Pretty scummy of them not to provide drivers for newer kernels.

@Benjamin Sure, all this Mali hype is soooooo useless. You don’t need 3D acceleration for 2D and video. This whole GPU thing is most probably just the result of people misinterpreting the word ‘GPU’. On x86 systems GPU means 2D, 3D and video but on ARM it means only 3D. And since almost no software makes use of old boring Mali’s OpenGL ES (no OpenGL!) it simply doesn’t matter. Some projects like Kodi see this differently (they want GPU support to draw the UI and if that’s not possible drop the whole SoC support) but for a normal desktop and… Read more »

@megous Megi, I’m now running with 4.9 and everything works except of thermal readouts (therefore also no throttling). Sunxi-ng clock driver is activated (I used lib/config/kernel/linux-sun8i-dev.config from github.com/igorpecovnik/lib) so maybe I just have to tweak DT? Will look into it as soon as mainline Wi-Fi driver is ready 🙂 Anyway: Did you succeed running code on the AR100? IMO this is still one of the most interesting use cases: Turning H2+/H3 boards into MCU like devices with ARM cores powered off, consuming less than 50mW while running solely on the OpenRISC core and activating the 4 x 1.2 GHz Cortex-A7… Read more »

@Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) What a beast! Nonacore, that’s one core per dollar! 😉 But to be honest this little gem looks really capable, especially the new Wi-Fi chip. I saw that it also supports mesh networks, maybe I buy two more and start to play around with open80211s and stuff like that. And regarding core count: Let’s forget about Mali and the 4 Cortex-A7. It would open up a whole world of new use cases if this board could also run with just the AR100 OpenRISC core and maybe XR819’s M0 active (low power mode). And maybe bringing up from… Read more »

@zoobab Seems so (can’t test any further since it seems I killed Wi-Fi yesterday on this board). ‘iw list’: Supported interface modes: * IBSS * managed * AP * AP/VLAN * monitor * mesh point * P2P-client * P2P-GO software interface modes (can always be added): * AP/VLAN * monitor valid interface combinations: * #{ managed } <= 2, #{ AP } <= 1, total <= 3, #channels <= 1 * #{ managed } <= 3, total <= 3, #channels <= 1 * #{ managed } <= 2, #{ P2P-client, P2P-GO } <= 1, total <= 3, #channels <= 1… Read more »

@RK Hmm… I don’t understand what you’re saying, so just as a hint: what ‘the RasPi’ does is controlled by the firmware (or a few folks who have access to this properietary stuff and are able to adjust dvfs settings for all the millions of users out there). AFAIK you can only control one thermal treshold? At least with Allwinner it’s more complicated: you have everything under your own control (requires some knowledge) or you have to trust. When you trust in hardware vendors (Allwinner and Xunlong in this case) you get an Orange Pi that performs low but heats… Read more »