Hi Jeremy!

Thanks for your report! Pretty much what I expected, unfortunately!

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 10:48 AM, Jeremy Jongepier <jeremy@autostatic.com> wrote:

On 06/18/2013 11:14 AM, Dan MacDonald wrote:

Thanks for sharing that Jeremy!

What are you going to use your 3066 for?

Hi Dan,

I'd like to use it for doing real-time lo-latency audio. Basically the same way I'm using my Raspberry Pi.

What are your initial impressions and findings?

Ambivalent. It sure is faster than a Raspberry Pi but RK3066 based devices have some drawbacks:
* No easy debugging access, I have yet to find the TXD pad on my RK3066.
* Fragmented development efforts. There are a gazillion git repositories with all kinds of kernel sources, tools, etc.
* There are simply a lot of RK3066 based devices around and since RockChip refuses to release their kernel source code people hacking on the RK3066/RK3188 depend on third-party manufacturers that do understand how GPL works and release parts of the code. Still there are things missing, I'm now searching for a way to access the NAND from within Linux but there is no source code anywhere for accessing the NAND on RK3066 based devices. Yeah, there are pre-compiled kernel modules but those don't work on my install.

That would seem to be the biggest issue with these devices atm but one that should legally be resolved asap.

Whether they 'get' FLOSS or not, either way they only stand to gain from doing as they legally, morally should.

* Closely related to the above bullet, yesterday I decided to flash the kernel to the kernel partition only to realize later that now I can't boot into anything else but Linux. And I can't flash anything either because I can't boot in the bootloader. Apparently I can short two pads and have the device boot into recovery but that won't help me either because I've flashed the recovery partition with, you guessed it right, a Linux kernel.
* JACK doesn't run on my device it with an external USB interface. It starts and then the kernel crashes.

That's what I expected, seeing how little success I've had on my Pandaboard with J2 git. Have you tried J1 too?

Thanks J!