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Comment by theamk | Hacker News Reader

The hardware does not seem to be mainline supported, which means that you are at the mercy of a vendor.

In other words, when they say "Ubuntu, Debian, Android, and Armbian" they don't actually mean you can run any future version of it, like you could for Raspberry Pi or x86 hardware. Instead, what they mean is: "We took a latest version of Debian/Ubuntu/Android/etc... and applied some patches to it to make it work on our board. But hey, it works today, and would maybe work next year too! And if you complain super hard we can fix some kernel bugs but no promises!"

This lack of support is a big reason to stay away from less famous SBCs.. Sometimes all you want is to make a project and forget about it, and that maybe fine. But if you want something to base multiple projects on, keep to stuff with mainlined kernels.

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I bought rk3588 nano pi r6s a few months ago, running ubuntu 22.04 with a custom kernel. Been watching progress, and it's been quite active. Out of tree patches work with newer kernels, various upstreaming efforts are underway, and various people have it working. Device trees, patches, drivers and the like are still a bit hodge podge, but getting better. OpenWRT has an active effort, the GigE+Dual 2.5Gbe make fora nice small router.

For now I'm happy with the 5.10.x supplied with ubuntu 22.04. Ethernet works, it's stable, and crazy faster than a Pi 4. But I do look forward to using a mainline kernel. Here's two URLs to track the progress:

https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...

https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-rockchip/list/

It looks like they are working on getting the Rockchip RK3588 mainlined.

CPU, PCI support is all there thanks to the QuartzPro64. At least with this one it looks like there are efforts rather than some of the other chipsets which don't have a chance.

There is a crazy amount of SBC's coming out with the RK3588, so I aldo think the chances are pretty good for this one.

Do any Rockchip chips have good upstream? Number of boards is not at all what I'd look for. Plenty of terrible sbc get made.

The track record of the chipmaker is the important thing, to me. It's not always clear cut. I think now there may be a more formal relationship, but Allwinner used to have good support from purely volunteer Bay Libre.

I'm far from certain but part of me wants to believe that's in sizable part also Allwinner doing a less ship, less ultra-forked job in the first place when they dump their own ugly gross hacked out vendor tree fork, where-as many of these vendor trees are just wildly awful.

Again, just to reiterate, I would never ever use board count as an indicator. Especially these days where there are only 2-4 (at best) chips available for use. Of course there's lots of sbc with this chip: the specs are great, the performance appears impressive, & there's literally no other chips to buy. That the vendor kernel is garbage & maybe there are oodles of little design bugs is like, not a big impediment to releasing hardware. Alas.

I think the biggest effort is being made by Pine64, the makers of PinePhone. Their PinePhone Pro used Rockchip's RK3399 which now has good mainline support (part of the selling point of the PinePhone Pro). Pine have released a SBC using the RK3588, and are working on mainlining that: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstrea...

That was my original point, I think this board might get some support but only by virtue of Pine also using this chip. Orange Pi and Banana Pi have never got anything upstreamed as far as I'm aware, and Rockchip seem uninterested as well.

I've played with these boards and they seem cool. I have a couple of NanoPi NEO3's because I really liked the form factor, and they perform really well, but I would never buy one of these and expect support. I would stick with Intel/AMD since they perform better, have better support, and the modern versions use little power and used is similar pricing.

Yeah, I saw you've mentioned the QuartzPro64, but I like linking to that mainlining status page. I've got a few RK3588 boards myself, the Rock5 and OPi5, but the use I wanted them for, better desktop OpenGL support with Panfrost than a Pi, isn't quite there yet. They're writing some new drivers for that:

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/panc...

The TuringPi RK1 modules should be available soonish too, they're prototyping boards right now. I'm hoping by the end of summer I can pick up a few for my cluster board.

Are they working on mainlinung code? I've not heard of this board before.

It's always good to hear about support, as more options are never a bad thing.

I've been a fan of ultra-SFF computers since the original Mac Mini, and SBCs are just an extension of that. If you're shrewd and smart about how you use the hardware, it's a tremendous amount of real computing power that can work done cheaply and for little power.

For certain, even if I don't have own an Orange Pi, I feel I owe at least a hat tip to software maintainers for putting in the effort to ensure some other ecosystem has a future.

Apparently it looks like DietPi — the primary lightweight distribution I use on my Pi Cluster — looks to be regularly creating images for the Orange Pi now, as well as tons of other Radxa boards, and RockChip SBC boards in general.

Definitely looks like there’s efforts to long-term support a lot of popular SBCs out there: https://dietpi.com/#download

Is Raspberry pi even fully mainline supported? Since it normally relies on raspbian.

In my experience they are very well supported. I think the old USB controller lacks some of the performance optimizations mainly. Not sure how fast the new board versions get support, though.

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