I thought RK3588 had pretty good mainline support, what's the issue with this board?

Yes, and no. I have an OrangePi 5 Ultra and I'm finally running a vanilla kernel on it.

Don't bother trying anything before kernel 6.18.x -- unless you are willing to stick with their 6.1.x kernel with a million+ line diff.

The u-boot environment that comes with the board is hacked up. eg: It supports an undocumented amount of extlinux.conf ... just enough that whatever Debian writes by default, breaks it. Luckily, the u-boot project does support the board and I was able to flash a newer u-boot to the boot media and then the onboard flash [1].

Now the hdmi port doesn't show anything and I use a couple of serial pins when I need to do anything before it's on-net.

--

I purchased a Rock 5T (also rk3588) and the story is similar ... but upstream support for the board is much worse. Doing a diff between device trees [2] (supplied via custom Debian image vs vanilla kernel) tells me a lot. eg: there are addresses that are different between the two.

Upstream u-boot doesn't have support for the board explicitly.

No display, serial console doesn't work after boot.

I just wanted this board for its dual 2.5Gb ethernet ports but the ports even seem buggy. It might be an issue with my ISP... they seem to think otherwise.

--

Not being able to run a vanilla kernel/u-boot is a deal-breaker for me. If I can't upgrade my kernel to deal with a vulnerability without the company existing/supporting my particular board, I'm not comfortable using it.

IMHO, these boards exist in a space somewhere between the old-embedded world (where just having a working image is enough) and the modern linux world (where one needs to be able to update/apply patches)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/OrangePI/comments/1l6hnqk/comment/n...

[2] https://gist.github.com/imoverclocked/1354ef79bd24318b885527...

Hardware video decoding support for h264 and av1 just landed in 7.0 so it hasn't been a great bleeding edge experience for desktop and Plex etc users. But IMO late support is still support.

I've got this bookmarked for tracking: https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...

Not on this list is the current GPU Vulkan drivers Collabora are working on too. Don't think that's really blame Rockchip since they're ARM Mali-G610 GPUs, but yeah those didn't get stable in Mesa until last year.

Video, networking, etc. To get working 3588 you’d have to go with a passionate group like MNT, and then you’re paying way more.

This is not an RK3588, to begin with.