RockPi4 support?

1st Official Post
    • Official Post

    It should be supportable, and if they care about good Linux support for their product they will submit a device tree file to the upstream kernel. If you don't see any submission .. they're just another clone vendor who expects "the community" to do all the leg-work for them.

    A reply from Rockchip,

    "Some developers is working on upstream for ROCK Pi. We already have the mainline u-boot and mainline kernel booting on ROCK Pi already.

    You can wait for the official announcement and mainline images for

    ROCK Pi."

    Hi all,

    Only just registered to the forum but I have been using LibreElec for nearly a year now on my rpi3b. I have been looking to upgrade and saw the Rock Pi 4 has recently been released.

    I had a look at GitHub: Radxa Limited · GitHub and can see that there is active development in the last couple of days. It seems on their website there is also both a Android TV (7.1 based) and Android images. I was wondering with the development happening on github whether this board has a hope of getting LibreElec support?

    Quote from CvH

    I have no idea about the drivers/software yet but nobody from us has an Rock"Pi"4 so even it may work nobody will add anything to LE at the moment. Without real hardware this is basically not supportable.

    Hi CvH,

    Thanks for coming back to me. That was probably obvious but something I didn't think about so thanks for confirming.

    I will wait and see for now how the development for different boards continues and if any of you guys pick up and start developing for the Rock Pi 4.


    Regards,

    Ravi

    Quote from chewitt

    It's an RK3399 device so if the manufacturer submits the device-tree to the mainline kernel it can picked up in future RK builds reasonably easily. If they don't .. well nothing will happen.

    Thanks for the reply chewitt,

    I have posted a message on the Rock Pi 4 forums. As with the posts earlier in this thread, the party line from the developers is that they are looking to do this but (how much) time will tell!?


    Regards,

    Ravi

    • Official Post

    Manufacturers are dumb about this kind of thing. They know kernel maintainers will give them work so they sit on their kernel changes until they think everything is perfect. Then eventually they submit and the kernel maintainers still pick everything apart and send stuff back for rework. Instead they should just submit early, get the feedback, then incorporate the feedback and resubmit. Sometime it takes 3-4 iterations to get everyone on-side and the kinks worked out, but persistence pays dividends - because once you get stuff upstream other people start caring about maintaining it.

    • Official Post
    Quote from rav101

    They have now updated the downloads page to say that LibreElec is coming soon:

    We have no hardware to test our images at all, so we won't add official support to it. We can't support something we couldn't not even test the release images. That may change, maybe, but no idea if anyone from the team wants to buy such a board. Otherwise there is no real problem at supporting it :)

    If in doubt and you have one. Try Testing other rk3399 builds in the mean time.

    I use a sapphire rk3399 build on a nanopi m4 who doesn't offer a dtb for libreelec. I just don't get ac wifi with it. But don't need it anyway. Bought it for their 4x sata hat they say they are releasing. If and when that happens it will probably be a dedicated omv nas with emby. But originally wanted it for retro console

    I do use it to share up dual bay usb 3.0 nas with libreelec and it can hit writes and reads in +70/100 Mb/s. But randomly it drops mounts. Exact same scenario occurs with my Libreelec rock64 too. But under omv their both pretty stable with the usb mounts.

    I kinda like the soc excellent picture quality. Love the idea of having both run dual duties with libreelec at separate tv's to share nas loads, mirror backups and cut power consumption from a pc based nas.

    • Official Post
    Quote from rav101

    I've been asking the question in the Radxa telegram group and forum. They have now updated the downloads page to say that LibreElec is coming soon:

    There is no known contact between people in our team and Radxa. So I guess they will hack something up based on the current early alpha images and then we will have to disown it because we'll have no knowledge of what got added. NB: We're still in the middle of rewriting the V4L2 driver and associated stateless interface code in ffmpeg so there will be no beta or full release LE 9.0 images for RK3399 - it will remain in Alpha.

    Quote from chewitt

    There is no known contact between people in our team and Radxa. So I guess they will hack something up based on the current early alpha images and then we will have to disown it because we'll have no knowledge of what got added. NB: We're still in the middle of rewriting the V4L2 driver and associated stateless interface code in ffmpeg so there will be no beta or full release LE 9.0 images for RK3399 - it will remain in Alpha.

    Tom from Radxa Team here. I am sorry for the confusion. We are very happy to work with the LibreELEC team to get ROCK Pi 4 supported. For the RK3399 platform, we think the device tree covers the hardware difference so it should not be hard to support another board. Yes, we do plan to release image based on the Alpha release with dtb replacement to meet the user demand first. We can also send PR to add support for ROCK Pi 4 and we can donate some hardware to LibreELEC developers for development.

    • Official Post

    Hello Tom. Our Rockchip codebase is in the process of being rebased against the Linux 4.20 kernel so please submit the working device-tree etc. to the upstream kernel first. If we see changes going upstream it becomes acceptable to add temporary patches to support your board. If we don't see any effort to upstream support our developers are unlikely to show interest. Thanks.

    Quote from chewitt

    Hello Tom. Our Rockchip codebase is in the process of being rebased against the Linux 4.20 kernel so please submit the working device-tree etc. to the upstream kernel first. If we see changes going upstream it becomes acceptable to add temporary patches to support your board. If we don't see any effort to upstream support our developers are unlikely to show interest. Thanks.

    Thanks. We will have ROCK Pi 4 supported in upstream first.