Plans for adding support into mainline?

#1

Presentation about the board uses “open source” phrase very often. Some may say that too often but that’s the other story.

Some people, outside of Radxa company, already have boards. So far no one complained about lack of kernel source which they should get access to due to GPLv2 license.

Public source code release is promised in “Q1 2025” so up to two months and we can take a look.

But that’s vendor kernel. 6.1, LTS, not up to date, vendor kernel. With whatever makes board run inside.

Who will take care of adding support for the board in mainline kernel? Radxa? Cixtech? Someone paid by one of them? Or random people from community in their spare time?

What about upstream edk2-platforms? Same question set.

I do not ask about FreeBSD support even cause it may be too early for it.

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#2

Just a quick note: whole China is on holiday since yesterday so please don’t expect ‘official’ answers right now (or even till Lantern Festival)

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#3

It is currently the Chinese New Year holiday, all work and responses are delayed. They sent the first batch of boards to early birds and developers in advance so that they can get familiar with the hardware in advance.

Who will take care of adding support for the board in mainline kernel? Radxa? Cixtech? Someone paid by one of them? Or random people from community in their spare time?

CIX tech said in their presentation that they will start upstreaming EDK2 and Linux kernel in the first half of 2025. You need a translator to read this from their website.

Translated version:

As we all know, for a successful development kit, open source support is essential. Cix technology will actively embrace the community and contribute to open source. For the newly released Radxa Orion O6 development kit, Cix technology will promote the open source and upstream support of EDK2 firmware and Linux kernel in the first half of 2025.

In fact, this board can already run the upstream kernel and distro well, just like the x86 platform, boot and flash the system through a flash disk. Personally, I am more concerned about the performance of video codec and GPU, so I decided to stay in BSP/vendor kernel for a while.

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#4

There’s no additional GPU on the PCIe bus? Framebuffer output?

Also curious why lspci output with distro vs. BSP kernel shows mismatching vendor IDs (with Cix/Radxa image I get 1f6c (registered for ’ CIX Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd’) while your output shows the Cadence ID (from them the whole PCie subsystem probably has been licensed).

#5

Yes. It’s simple-drm out.

BSP kernel has CONFIG_PHY_CIX_PCIE=y, which i think they will upstream this driver.

#6

Regarding source availability, for having myself been through that process of distributing hardware and having to package sources in a downloadable and buildable form in the past, I can say that it can take an amazing amount of work just to package something you’re not ashamed of. During development you can have dirty processes, stuff that only works on your local machine, ugly scripts quickly done an afternoon etc that you cannot even expose. We’ve all seen some build scripts with hard-coded NFS or TFTP server addresses for example. That’s a pain to go through, but it must be done and takes time. Let’s for now trust them that this will really happen. If it does not we can start to ask, but for now everything’s more or less on time so let’s not annoy everyone on the grounds of opensource claims, it just discourages vendors from doing so next time!

Also it makes sense to debug before mainlining. It often takes a long time to get patches accepted into mainline projects (kernel, boot loaders, etc), and sometimes they must even be completely re-architected. Thus better provide something that requires few future changes at once.

Regarding FreeBSD, I know Radxa gave a few boards away to select developers. I also presented another one I know who could be helpful.

I really think that Radxa is acting well with available resources, let’s not disturb their work, it would only delay things.

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#7

Possibly the same as Rockchip, I gave up with Rock 4 starting with kernel 4.1, then nothing…then Armbian did some hacks on some vendor kernel to make it working. Yes, the board is open source, good quality but you can use it for gaming and Android box without mainline kernel. Some they say that these processors have in-built spy feature for Chinese govt. and this is the reason to have only vendor kernels.

#8

It’s probably not needed to bring such absurdities here, twitter (now X) usually is a better place for that type of crap that only small groups want to believe in.

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#9

Some they say that these processors have in-built spy feature for Chinese govt. and this is the reason to have only vendor kernels.

Come on, if people could have more critical thinking, the world wouldn’t be as absurd as it has been in recent years.

In short, vendor kernels are produced by Rockchip to pursue short-term commercial interests, and avoid spending time upstreaming every patch. They have not learned much from the open source community.


As for CIX, they have already started submitting it upstream. A young company may not be as experienced as an old one, but it may also not be as stubborn and conservative.

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#10

Many years ago, I would also think that it’s all BS. I have many relations on Chinese hardware and their support. They always keep secrets, why? Can you give an explanation, why a company like Rockchip doesn’t want to expose details, while others are willing to launch their SOC into a mainline kernel as soon as possible?

#11

why… why … why …

There’s an old saying “Never attribute to malice what can simply be explained by ignorance”. There are many reasons neither you nor I are aware of that make them think it’s better this way and that’s all. But you’re free to believe in whatever you want. Just please don’t spread out-of-topic and consipiracies here on forums that users employ to share technical knowledge and issues. Thank you for your understanding.

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#12

Your comment also apply perfectly to the NVIDIA Jetson series development board, which is still being bought by robotic vision and AI developers. It is well known that this is because NVIDIA does not care about open source or Linux users.

Compared to them, Rockchip is just a random small company that is not worth mentioning. What they have in common is that they all pursue maximum profits and are responsible to shareholders.

#13

while others are willing to launch their SOC into a mainline kernel as soon as possible

Name those others.

Check this as an example:

https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/01/20/linux-6-13-release-main-changes-arm-risc-v-and-mips-architectures/

Who does best in the ARM world. Qualcomm! Can you run mainline kernel on your latest Snapdragon phone?

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