Rockchip RK3566 & RK3568 processors were just officially announced at the end of the year, and soon followed with announcements of related such as Core-3568J AI Core system-on-module, some Android 11 TV boxes, Station P2 mini PC, and RK3566/RK3568 development boards.
But it did not take long, as RK3566/RK3568 are about the get support for mainline Linux, with engineers from Collabora and Rockchip having recently committed preliminary support for RK356x platforms, notably using Pine64 Quartz64 SBC for testing.
The most recent commits target power management, networking, and the PCI host controller. It’s not clear when code will be merged to mainline, but Collabora said “Pine64 Quartz64 SBC out-of-the-box support is right around the corner” in a recent tweet.
In any case, it’s good news there’s active development for mainline Linux on the new Rockchip processors, as that means it will be possible to run the latest version of Linux on RK3566 & RK3568 without having to rely on an often poorly maintained vendor SDK.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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[spoiler title=”He’s Going To Say It”] RK3588 [/spoiler]
So what version, do the present on sale, RK3566 TV boxes run under Android?
https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/02/16/pine64-unveils-quartz64-sbc-powered-by-rockchip-rk3566-soc/#comment-580995
So, do we know if the PCI-E controller is any good or is it trash like the Allwinner one? I don’t expect much from the PCI-E 2.x one as that’s probably just meant to talk to a Wifi chip and won’t need to be very good, but I sure hope the PCI-E 3.0 one can support actual real hardware so that there’s a small hope that a board could have a normal looking 1x slot that could actually take real devices. I’m not asking for a GPU, but I know *someone*’s going to say it.
I might be wrong, but from watching the Pine64 updates video, a lot is still work in progress.
Rockchip have often promised to provide open source support, only to consistently come up short, so I won’t expect much.
AMLogic seems to have stolen much of their thunder over recent years, so they do nee to do something more positive to stay in the game.