I am posting the following in the capacity of an errand boy ;)

Anarsoul has done a lot of work on the A64 and has custom patches for the Pine A64, SOPine and the Pinebook that have not found their way into mainline yet (his git: https://github.com/anarsoul/). He only does Arch and has no knowledge of Debian/ Ubuntu. I recently asked on Twitter and PINE64 forum which OS users would like to see the Pinebook ship and many users reported Armbian.

If anyone would be willing to help incorporate Anarsoul's work into Armbian so that we could have more features working on the aforementioned devices on mainline, then please have a chat with him in the linux-sunxi or pine64 IRC. 

I manage to use his work to boot Teres back in June, but I haven't done much more on the issue. I haven't tried Pinebook.

 

I see. In either case, I am glad to see you're aware of his work. His Arch image for the Pinebook works quite well and most features you'd want on a laptop work.

Also, thank you for updating the BSP image for the Pinebook to 18.04.

1 hour ago, lukasz said:

I see. In either case, I am glad to see you're aware of his work. His Arch image for the Pinebook works quite well and most features you'd want on a laptop work.

Also, thank you for updating the BSP image for the Pinebook to 18.04.

OK, I will see what I can do about. Thanks.

8 hours ago, lukasz said:

His Arch image for the Pinebook works quite well and most features you'd want on a laptop work.

Almost there. Out of important stuff, wireless ... the rest, DRM video driver, PWM, requires a lot of patching or switching to 4.19.y ... I am not sure if everything will works since there are many ongoing changes in this ares.
https://dl.armbian.com/pinebook-a64/nightly/

This is great Igor. I'll test the image tonight or tomorrow morning; I'll also share the image with some users who are capable of constructive feedback.

Igor, the rtl8723cs package: https://github.com/anarsoul/rtl8723cs

1 hour ago, lukasz said:

rtl8723cs

I don't know if this github is better than what we have already part of this patch :

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/armbian/build/master/patch/kernel/sunxi-dev/wifi-add-realtek-8189fs.patch

But I known that it seems working fine under OrangePiPrime which is also a RTL8723

22 minutes ago, martinayotte said:

I don't know if this github is better than what we have already part of this patch :

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/armbian/build/master/patch/kernel/sunxi-dev/wifi-add-realtek-8189fs.patch

But I known that it seems working fine under OrangePiPrime which is also a RTL8723

Teres has the same as Prime, RTL8723BS and it works. Does RTL8723CS need a different driver? I don't know ATM.  Bed time

11 hours ago, lukasz said:

Igor, the rtl8723cs package: https://github.com/anarsoul/rtl8723cs

Works until suspending ... then it doesn't come back. A nightly image was updated. https://dl.armbian.com/pinebook-a64/Debian_stretch_dev_desktop_nightly.7z

Thanks Igor. Do you get your Pinebook to suspend? my screen flickers when I close the lid or issue suspend command, but the Pinebook doesn't suspend. The wifi disconnects and reconnects straight after.

38 minutes ago, lukasz said:

Do you get your Pinebook to suspend?

No, wireless driver pops out some error that it can't go to sleep. Will have to wait for next chunk of time.

With the new 1080p Pinebooks shipping and 4.20 kernel making the A64 more functional, think we could see an updated mainline build for the new Pinebooks ?

19 minutes ago, lukasz said:

With the new 1080p Pinebooks shipping and 4.20 kernel making the A64 more functional, think we could see an updated mainline build for the new Pinebooks ?

Waiting for mine to arrive, then I will see what can be done. Last time I was trying to put it together, support was bad, while Teres, which is very similar, is working much better ... and we have some usable but still more or less a preview build.

Do you recall what problems you encountered ?

2 hours ago, lukasz said:

Do you recall what problems you encountered ?

 
IIRC unstable wifi ... common with teres: no suspend, no dvfs, no pwm

Anarsoul's Arch image has dvfs, pwm and working wifi. Perhaps, if you've got the time and incentive, check out his git again? But yes, suspend does not work - hibernate does however.

20 minutes ago, lukasz said:

Anarsoul's Arch image has dvfs, pwm and working wifi

In 4.19.y or 4.18.y ?

I am pretty certain its 4.19 (confirmed by user in irc). Anarsoul's git:  https://github.com/anarsoul/linux-build/releases

[edit] I believe that the kernel decides the resolution of the lcd panel based on edid - unlike in bsp - so one image for both new and old Pinebooks.

43 minutes ago, lukasz said:

I am pretty certain its 4.19 (confirmed by user in irc). Anarsoul's git:  https://github.com/anarsoul/linux-build/releases

[edit] I believe that the kernel decides the resolution of the lcd panel based on edid - unlike in bsp - so one image for both new and old Pinebooks.

I only tried back than on 4.18.y and many things are fixed in 4.19.y regarding A64 ... it's much better then (smelly) 3.10.y kernel. I hope I will be able to do this once next week.

Thank you. I'll check back next week - also do let me know if there is some way I could help out.

For reference, just use anarsoul's branch: https://github.com/anarsoul/linux-2.6

Hi,

I would like to see Armbian on Pine64, SOPine and Pinebook too. It would be really great!

I did some builds of Debian for SOPine with anarsoul's mainline kernel and u-boot, stability is good and there is many working interfaces.

If you need, I can test Armbian builds on SOPine and also Pinebook (1080p), and also help generally with adding support for Armbian.