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:
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.
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.