So, since a bit of time has passed, with the pandemic and all that, I wanted to see what's the state of the SBC world, if the known manufacturers are still there and what are they up to now.
I'll try to see if they still make Allwinner H3 based boards, what's their Raspberry Pi contender (and what chipset it uses) and what's their Raspberry Pi Zero alternative (and chipset).

Orange Pi (Shenzhen Xunlong)

Orange Pi H3 offering included the Lite, PC, PC Plus, One and Zero.
All seem to be still available on AliExpress with prices from $25 to $45.

Their current RPi contender seems to be the Orange Pi 3B, that uses a Rockchip RK3566.
Their RPi Zero contender is the Orange Pi Zero 2W with an AllWinner H618.

Banana Pi (Guangdong Bipai Technology)

Banana Pi H3 offering includes the BPI-M2 Zero (their RPi Zero contender), BPI-M2+ and BPI-P2 Zero.
You can get a BPI-M2 Zero for around $20-30 on AliExpress.

They have 2 RPi contenders:
BPI-M4 with Realtek RT1395 and BPI-M4 Berry with Allwinner H618.

NanoPi (Friendly Elec)

Their H3 offer are the M1 Plus, that goes for $45-60 on AliExpress and the Duo2 (their "Zero") for around $30-40.
Their RPi contender is the M4, with a Rockchip RK3399.

Libre Computer (Shenzhen Libre Technology)

They have the ALL-H3-CC (Tritium) boards. But their H2+/H3 boards (under $20) seem to be out of stock.

Their RPi contenders are the AML-S905X-CC (Le Potato) with Amlogic S905X and the ROC-RK3328-CC (Renegade) with Rockchip RK3328.

And of course, the mother of all SBCs, Raspberry Pi 5, just released with an Broadcom BCM2712 chip and a custom controller.

And other than that, there's the HTPC set top boxes with H3 chips inside.
If you find another board worth mentioning, just put it here.

I hope you find the information useful.

Edit: while Mango Pi has no H3 offering, they have a Zero style board, the MQ-Quad, with H616 and H618 chipsets.

  • uli replied to this.

    Dmian

    JFYI, I have gotten myself an Orange Pi with an H616 (because that seems to be the standard chip for STBs ATM), with the intention of checking how easy/hard/impossible it would be to port the RX system to another SoC.

    For now, I have built myself a buildroot system with a 6.1 kernel of unknown repute with numerous questionable patches to get all the hardware working, and another bunch of patches to get Jailhouse to work. I have not, however, had the chance to try it out yet.

    Jailhouse can run 32-bit payloads on 64-bit systems, so that should not cause any issues, but I'd have to implement new DE, HDMI, I2S and audio codec drivers. The latter two are probably not very hard (famous last words...), but especially the HDMI might be tricky, that stuff being notoriously un(der)documented.

    (I wish there were reasonably priced boards with the H5, which is near-identical to the H3 except for the 64-bit ARM cores, but no such luck...)

        uli The H616 seems to be a reasonable chipset. As you said, there are a ton of STBs with it for reasonable prices. And even a couple SBCs with it. Is the H618 compatible? I have no idea, but if both could use the same codebase without modifications, that would be great, as both are used in cheap STBs and SBCs.

        I also saw that Jailhouse has an image for RPi Pi 4. These seem to be coming down in price, as RPi 5 was released (which, btw, has instantly become unobtanium). May it be considered an option? I know they’re not as cheap, but it’s a pretty popular platform (a lot of people have a RPi 4 already) and there’s also that keyboard version (RPi 400) that makes it like a very attractive proposition.

        I’m just thinking out loud. But the idea of BASIC Engine on the RPi 400, with one of those cheap 10 inch screens from AE seems sweet in my head.

        In any case, whatever you decide will be fine by me, as long as I can keep using BE 😄

        Edit: I checked, and the H618 is just an H616 with a larger (1MB) L2 cache, so they're basically identical and compatible. ☺️ So, BE running on H616/H618 should run on the Orange Pi Zero 2W, Banana Pi BPI-M4 Berry and Mango Pi MQ-Quad and the myriad of STB on AliExpress...

        Edit2: Are you using this? https://github.com/maskmoo/H616_BareMetal 😝

        • uli replied to this.

            Haven't heard of that yet. Unfortunately no HDMI or sound drivers, that's what I would be after.

            Jailhouse allows setting up the virtual memory map in whichever way you want, so my approach would be to try to remap everything to be as compatible with the H3 as possible. Allwinner SoCs and many of the IPs inside them are very similar, so for simple devices that might just work to some extent.

            As far as supporting the video and audio goes, I'm not sure how to go about it yet. One approach would be to leverage Linux driver support by having Linux initialize the video bits and patch the driver to leave the device alone afterwards. The other would be to use MMIO register traces/dumps to bring up the device quickly.

            For the HDMI bits there is no documentation, I don't even know what IP it is. u-boot doesn't support it, only some Linux kernels do.

                uli Question: is this what’s needed to create BASIC Engine for the RPi 4?
                https://www.rpi4os.com/
                I’ll read it, because it seems interesting (though it may be too complex for me).

                • uli replied to this.

                    Dmian Question: is this what’s needed to create BASIC Engine for the RPi 4?
                    https://www.rpi4os.com/

                    That's pretty close. It doesn't seem to cover hardware scaling, but I guess that can be figured out somehow.

                      3 months later

                      The H5 is almost exactly identical to the H3, except that the CPU cores have been swapped for 64-bit ones. The porting effort would be very low, but I'm not going to work on that right now because I still have my hands full with the dreaded H616...

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