Adding RK3588/RK3588S support?

    LE will support them once the upstream kernels we are based upon support core essentials like HDMI, Ethernet, mesa for GPU, and all the hardware decoders which are almost the same as existing chips (but enough different to need some work). There is quite a lot of activity from some of the professional development shops and Rockchip community sources (including some of our own contributors). All the media folks poking code are people we know (and who know us) so once things start to progress I'm sure we'll start taking a closer interest.

    NB: It's probably possible to frankenstein an image today using the downstream vendor kernel and mali blobs etc. That's fine for desktop and industrial focussed distros like Manjaro and Armbian but "all the media stuff needs to work" for LE support and this is always the weakness in downstream kernels. It will be a fairly simple to get the basics for an image, but a large effort to get right, and all that effort will be superseded once upstream support kicks in, and we already have plenty of things to work on with existing RK SoCs .. so best to be patient.

    Current state of upstream is being tracked here:

    mainline-status.md · main · hardware-enablement / Rockchip RK3588 upstream enablement efforts / Notes for Rockchip 3588 · GitLab
    Collabora GitLab
    gitlab.collabora.com

    HDMI exists in downstream kernels but wasn't reworked and submitted upstream yet, and there are media codec bits missing. AV1 was submitted (to asssist completion of a work package for Mediatek SoCs) but other codecs are still missing. As usual there's a reasonable amount of inheritance from earlier generations but always some changes to work though, and because the primary interest on these SoCs in the Linux world is industrial/IoT applications the media stuff is nearly always done last.

    TL/DR; previous statements are still valid :)

    HDMI was submitted last week. That opens up the option for LE to create an image that software decodes all media, which will be quite usable as RK3588 has a strong CPU. Otherwise we now need to wait for codecs. That's always the tricky bit that takes ages for developers to get done (and get right). Meanwhile .. time passes.

    Codec work is progressing faster than I'd hoped, thanks to collabora.

    mainline-status.md · main · hardware-enablement / Rockchip RK3588 upstream enablement efforts / Notes for Rockchip 3588 · GitLab
    Collabora GitLab
    gitlab.collabora.com

    AV1 has been in mainline since 6.7, and the usual codecs minus H.265 have been submitted upstream, and the armbian edge kernel has them included. Hopefully with the rkvdec2 support that as added as part of the H.264 patchset, H.265 won't be too far behind.