Re: Do Olimex A64 and A20 Work With Libre Kernel ?

> I have had issues on ARM distros before of them not booting on my RockPro64 once I installed the libre kernel.

That's weird — back in 2021 I installed a linux-libre kernel from Jxself's APT repo and successfully used it on RockPro64. The problem you're experiencing might lie somewhere else and not in the kernel. Maybe Das U-Boot config needs to be hacked a bit?

> I have seen the Olimex A20 and A64 mentioned here before as good examples of devices that are far more free than other SBC boards. Do they work with the libre kernel though ?

In one thread on this forum Jxself mentioned some Allwinner SoCs didn't use to work with mainline linux-libre. It means they require (or at least did back then) the linux-sunxi kernel. But one should still be able to run the deblob scripts on linux-sunxi kernel and compile that (I have not tried as I have no hw with Allwinner in it).

Nevertheless, support for particular features of such SoCs gets upstreamed gradually to Linus' kernel tree (from where it also gets to linux-libre). I found this resource that attempts to document the progress with Allwinner chips

https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort

It looks like some SoCs – including the 2 you mentioned by name — have relatively good support as of today :)