There was a question asking after upstream support for the Odroid N2+, currently easily the fastest most powerful Single Board Computer (SBC) under $100 (starts at $63). I had a pretty robust answer then[1] with lots of details.
The short answer is: the Amlogic chip's ARM "Bifrost" GPU is still basically unusable, because ARM has a huge problem upstreaming anything, but that could maybe change some day. But the rest of the platform is what I would classify as "fantastically well supported", and will run excellently with a mainline kernel (and also with fantastic uboot support)[2].
We're still some time away from boot-systems being standardized, so uboot is "the" way to go pretty much now, which targets embedded systems, but eventually we all hope the Server Based Boot Requirements[3]- which mandate ACPI and UEFI support- will become semi-standard, such that we can use better secured & more capable standardized bootloaders.
The short answer is: the Amlogic chip's ARM "Bifrost" GPU is still basically unusable, because ARM has a huge problem upstreaming anything, but that could maybe change some day. But the rest of the platform is what I would classify as "fantastically well supported", and will run excellently with a mainline kernel (and also with fantastic uboot support)[2].
We're still some time away from boot-systems being standardized, so uboot is "the" way to go pretty much now, which targets embedded systems, but eventually we all hope the Server Based Boot Requirements[3]- which mandate ACPI and UEFI support- will become semi-standard, such that we can use better secured & more capable standardized bootloaders.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24813526
[2] http://linux-meson.com/doku.php#kernel_mainlining_progress
[3] https://community.arm.com/iot/b/internet-of-things/posts/arm...