How Armbian are different (compared to OrangePi images)

[Armin Ranjbar]

Hello,

 

i was wondering, how Armbian images are different compared to official orangepi images available on their webiste?

 

clearly, orangepi official images are not well maintained or regularly updated, but what's armbian policy here? 

are official images using proprietary drivers that armbian doesn't?

 

for example, mali450 (on H5) for armbian is not available, is it the same on official images? what the difference? avoiding non-free software?

 

 

[Tido]

Hi,

 

And welcome to the forum.

Most of your question are answered in here: https://docs.armbian.com/

[Armin Ranjbar]

@Tido Thanks, already read those, my question are a bit more specific:

 

i already know that Armbian has major improvements over OP images, but if OP-PC2 use Mali450 using a proprietary driver, will that driver be included in Armbian?

 

[zador.blood.stained]

H5 boards is not a good example for the comparison:

"Official" Orange  PI images are available only with 3.10.x BSP kernel and BSP u-boot.

Armbian images - only unsupported nightly images with the mainline kernel. For example using Mali here is not possible at all, but it doesn't matter much because Armbian is mostly focused at server/headless usage and advanced desktop features such as Mali driver are available only for a small subset of supported boards (A10, A20 and H3). Once H5 is supported well enough by mainline u-boot and kernel we will provide supported Armbian images for H5 based baords.

[Armin Ranjbar]

I see, assuming someone needs Mali support for H5, official images are the only way. correct?

 

[zador.blood.stained]

1 minute ago, Armin Ranjbar said:

I see, assuming someone needs Mali support for H5, official images are the only way. correct?

Currently - yes, assuming Mali works there (no idea) and assuming you don't want to spend several days collecting WIP patches to try to enable Mali with its prerequisites (DRM display driver, ION or dma-buf for memory allocation) on mainline.