2017-05-10 16:38 GMT+02:00 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net>:
On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 3:23 PM, Pablo <pablo@parobalth.org> wrote:

> With any non-Chip-kernel you will lose NAND support.
> So you can either:
> a)patch your libre kernel
> or
> b) ignore NAND and use flash memory via usb port.
>
> For b) you will need mainline U-Boot because NextThings U-Boot fork
> supports NAND but not booting via usb.

 this sounds weird / not quite right. the R8 (aka A13, aka the A10)
should be able to use the same sunxi 3.4.104+ kernel source as i've
been using for the A20, which has the (sunxi, libre) NAND driver in
it.  afaik they didn't change the NAND hardware from the A10/A20 to
the A13 to the R8 so this should be a non-issue.

 also from what i gather there's been mainline support for the
(completely different, MTD-compatible) NAND driver for quite some
time, so again, should be a non-issue.

 perhaps someone could ask on #linux-sunxi and/or their mailing list
for confirmation of the facts?
Wiki says "work in progress"
 
http://linux-sunxi.org/Mainlining_Effort
http://linux-sunxi.org/NAND (Fun facts on supported NAND)
http://linux-sunxi.org/MTD_Driver

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/linux-sunxi/mtd%7Csort:relevance

Boris has commit access so it's probably all there since 4.7

His work and derivatives did touch a lot of NAND/MTD drivers though.

Someone needs to crawl the linux kernel commits though or ask directly.