The Rockchip RK3588 is one of the most popular Arm SoCs for single board computers, and while good progress has been made with regards to mainline u-b

Rockchip RK3588 mainline Linux support – Current status and future work for 2025

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2024-12-21 18:00:07

The Rockchip RK3588 is one of the most popular Arm SoCs for single board computers, and while good progress has been made with regards to mainline u-boot and Linux support, the SoC is quite complex and it takes time to port all its features even though it was first teased in 2020 and the first Rockchip RK3588 SBCs were introduced in 2022.

While the simpler Rockchip RK3566 and RK3568 SoCs are already fairly well supported in mainline Linux, more work is needed to upstream code, and as noted before in posts and comments here, Collabora keeps track of the status on Gitlab, and the company recently posted an article about the progress and future plans related to upstream Linux support for Rockchip RK3588.

So that means it’s still not possible to use HDMI output on the Rockchip RK3588 at the end of 2024 with mainline Linux. Luckily, we won’t have to wait too long with Linux 6.13 will implement HDMI display support. But as nothing is easy, we’re told more work is needed, and support for more clock rates is in the works to enable additional display resolutions. Upstream support for HDMI audio and CEC is also planned for 2025. Besides HDMI output, HDMI input is being worked on by Shreeya Patel and Dmitrii Osipenko with a V4L2 driver expected sometime in 2025.

Heiko Stübner has also been working on a series enabling MIPI DSI support and at the time of writing the goal is to have it merged in Linux 6.14 (March 2025). Detlev Casanova is also working on VDPU381 H264 support, but this requires more analysis to understand how the IOMMU should be handled, and work is needed to support both cores of this IP block. Collabora is also hopeful that Tomeu Vizoso’s open-source kernel driver for the RK3588’s NPU will also be upstreamed next year.