[fedora-arm] Mele A1000G Quad (AllWinner A31 quad core Cortex-A7)

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 11/22/2013 04:08 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>
> I'm pretty impressed with the general build quality of the
> Mele A1000G Quad.  It seems to me that development boards offer no
> real advantage over it.
>
> What sort of information would I need to collect in order to have this
> working in Fedora or with the AllWinner remix?  Looking at Hans's
> github repositories it seems like the "*.fex" file is important in
> some way, but I don't know where this comes from or how to create it.
> Apart from this is anything else required?

The problem is not so much gathering the specfile, the problem is that
the A31 soc inside the A100G quad is not yet supported by linux-sunxi
kernels, nor by the sunxi u-boot branch...

So getting this box up and running will be far from simple.

It will likely require a similar effort as what I went through when
doing the bring up of the A20, which took me approx 2 months, working
1 day / week on it. I did this by porting the support from an allwinner
android kernel code dump to the linux-sunxi repository.

Alternatively you could just use an allwinner kernel code dump, those
should work, but you would loose a lot of enhancements done in the
linux-sunxi code. IE the hdmi out then won't do DCC / use EDID info,
and will only work with hdmi televisions. Even hdmi computer monitors
often don't work as the allwinner display code in their kernels sends
yuv over hdmi instead of rgb, and dvi monitors certainly won't work.

Regards,

Hans