Allwinner A64 Support Being Worked On For Mainline Kernel

Many Phoronix readers have been intrigued by the Pine A64, a Kickstarter project for manufacturing the first $15 ARM 64-bit single-board computer. That cheap ARM64 SBC is powered by the Allwinner A64 SoC and the good news is that there's work underway on allowing for mainline Linux kernel support.

Andre Przywara of ARM Holdings published basic Allwinner (A64) support under a "request for comments" flag on the kernel mailing list.

He wrote at the beginning of the patch series today, "This is a first step for introducing support for the Allwinner A64 SoC that made a recent appearance on the Pine A64 board featured on Kickstarter. This mini-series prepares the ground by allowing ARCH_SUNXI to be defined for an arm64 kernel."

However, the support isn't complete for the Allwinner A64 and is blocked in part by lack of proper documentation. Andre commented, "Due to a lack of official documentation and hardware availability this doesn't go any further at this moment."

The Allwinner A64 is comprised of the less-powerful Cortex-A53 cores, supports H.264/H.265 video decoding, and is widely talked about as being the "$5 ARM SoC." Hopefully this mainline kernel support will get figured out in time for the Pine A64 shipping.