ROCKPro64

1st Official Post

    Ok

    So Im going take the leap and move from my Old Pi 2 to the ROCKPro64

    I have a couple of Newb questions though

    1. Will Support remain for ROCKPro64 as it has for the PI as these devices wont be sold in their millions?

    2. As the Chip is standard does this mean support will remain ?

    3 Does this "V4L2" effect things as I understand this support would be great going forward as things would be normalised regardless of you the chip set used ?

    4 When do you expect Libreelec to be out of beta for the ROCKPro64 RK3399 ?

    :)

    I have read on the Pine64 website: "The ROCKPro64 4GB board designated as LTS (long Term Supply) model, PINE64 committed to supply at least for 5 years until year 2023 and beyond.".

    It still has things to fix, like audio passthrough, ethernet issues or 4k 10bit videos, but I hope that have a solution someday.

    • Official Post

    Rockchip is currently using an older 4.4 kernel codebase and things are in a "basic functional" state; it works and we've learned lots about RK support but it's not perfect and we don't plan on developing it much further. In the near future we will rebase our Rockchip support against the mainline Linux kernel - probably after 4.20/5.0 is released. This will be initially less functional than the 4.4 codebase, but once we start finding and fixing things on mainline we can upstream the fixes directly to the kernel and we don't end up carrying a huge patchset that's at a different state to other hardware platforms. Rockchip video decoding also needs to make the evolutionary leap from using an ffmpeg hwaccel to a proper stateless V4L2 decoder so it's using the same Kodi code-paths as everything else - and that's quite a bit of work. So Rockchip images will not move to Beta for LE 9.0, but the goal is to have everything sorted for LE 10.0 (Kodi v19) latest, or an interim release if possible.

    TL/DR; RockPro64 is a nice board but you should not expect the same level of maturity as the Raspberry Pi for a while.