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Why not donating it to the linux-sunxi community like https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/linux-sunxi/sMMqCjUfoLE
I think it depends on the use case for the board in question. In case you want to replace a NAS (IIRC this was your plan?) a SoC without SATA is clearly the wrong choice. But tricky marketing (advertising the board as SATA capable since 'there is a SATA connector on the board') does its job. People think 'hey it's cheap, has SATA and has twice as much CPU cores than A20 based boards. It must be faster' (which is a spectacular false assumption as anyone can easily realize when you look at older Marvell SoCs used in NAS boxes: for example the 88F6281 which features a single-core ARMv5TE CPU @ 1-1.2GHz, but 2 good Gbit NICs and 2 SATA ports: Any device which this SoC easily outperforms an Orange Pi Plus with its quad core CPU and slow USB-to-SATA-bridge when it' about NAS useage).
Maybe this is the reason why vendors like Xunlong or eg. SinoVoip don't support the linux-sunxi community by donating a few new devices for which mainline support is missing. The linux-sunxi community will do the work if anybody's interested in the hardware. But this will take some time. And in the meantime the hardware vendor already tries to sell the next version of their boards featuring an octa-core SoC since customers are always dumb enough to believe 'the more cores, the better' (who understands SMP challenges? Who understand cache coherency and the like? Who understands I/O latency and so on?)
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