RK3588 is actually a decent SoC for running Windows ARM64. Its CPU uses the same architecture as Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx, only with lower clock speed. But more importantly, it has much more IO exposed to the user, and most of the documents are open to public compared with Qualcomm. That’s why I’m creating a mega Windows thread for Rock 5 here (maybe also for other rk3588 devices).
Rockchip is still working on their EDK2 UEFI port, and Radxa uploaded the BSP here. But the code and repo structure isn’t really nice to work with. To get the ball rolling, I created another repository based on the one from Rockchip, trying to organize everything properly:
Nice so basically you got Windows on Rock 5B.
Thing is… if nothing will be compatible… steam etc etc…
Wouldnt be also a good idea to try a ChromeOS (version like ChromiumOS) since its more turned to Desktop and also has the compatible store ?
This is probably off topic, but does this mean we can uefi boot grub and use grub to boot linux straight into the userland? Will HDMI work after the kernel is loaded?
Well this is not off topic, UEFI can be used to boot mainline LInux. If UEFI set up the HDMI framebuffer, Linux can simply use it with the efifb driver.
However, Rockchip is still working on HDMI support in UEFI.
With no GPU driver I think it uses software rendering via generic video driver, it worked surprisingly well on the Raspberry Pie 4 (no GPU driver either) not as bad as I thought it would be.
An external GPU may not work as the display drivers included in Windows 11 Arm seem to only support Qualcomm hardware.
Something that might be of interest is that Windows 11 Arm does support some Red Hat virtual machine display drivers which can use GPU acceleration (on paper), would it even be technically possible to run Win 11 Arm in QEMU linux and pass the OpenGL/Vulkan acceleration through the VM drivers ?, probably a big project even if it were possible.
The performance of Adreno under windows and x86-64 emulation isn’t that great but it can run some current games at 30fps.
Mediatek not to long ago implied that MS and Qualcomm have an exclusivity deal so whenever that deal expires is probably when you might see Arm Mali GPU drivers appear for windows.
Working
Partial
Not working
Untested
