Running Mainline Linux, U-Boot, and Mesa on Rockchip: A Year in Review

> On that last point, I felt it necessary to justify why RK3576 is an interesting target. Many more casual observers seem to see an SoC with older licensed core designs and miss the forest for the trees in the process. The talk details how RK3576 is more than a cost-optimised little brother: it's a stepping stone towards future designs.

Unfortunately I bought a bunch of Radxa Zero 3W's, which use the RK3566. An older design though, from around when RK3588 was also arriving. Mainline support is not that bad. But I don't think there's much focus on improving it. Mostly I just want video encoding; my original use case was using it as an HDMI -> wireless transmitter.

As we head into this computing crunch, alas, these lesser chips are going to be quite important. There's some really nice Allwinner A733 chips too, but I don't think support is nearly on par with what Collabora has cooked up for Rockchip. That's a huge advantage, and it's fantastic.

There was a really scary time a year ago when it felt like Rockchip was going to disappear from open source. There's still a question of availability of SBC systems, but where we are is so much better than it looked like things were going to be, 15 months ago. Great follow up post here, on the post 5 days ago about the great progress with video decoding going to mainline. I wonder how Allwinner is doing with their A733 & maybe upcoming A737. https://mastodon.social/@geerlingguy/113698847221483936 https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/rk35... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47157285

There's a very good support matrix, showing which kernel version lands support for what Rockchip thing, that is just delightful to see: https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...