Green0Photon t1_j5gz2ki wrote on January 22, 2023 at 10:58 PM

Reply to comment by _91919 in Radxa Rock5 Model A is a credit card-sized single-board PC with RK3588S and up to 16GB RAM (starting at $99) by giuliomagnifico

Imagine if everything was upstream Linux and used UEFI/EBBR to boot and interact with firmware. Then we wouldn't have to deal with weirdo quirky systems and people could actually use these boards with confidence.

It's just that RPI is so popular that its quirks can be worked around and that it can be mostly upstreamed.

cAtloVeR9998 t1_j5h55fq wrote on January 22, 2023 at 11:39 PM

It may not be SystemReady, but it will capable of running a generic ARM image with a standard ESP setup. Though the catch is, you need to flash the SPI ROM first. This means either plugging it into a different machine, booting it up into firmware flashing mode (maskrom), and using rkdeveloptool to flash the image. Or boot their custom image off a microSD card or eMMC module and flash from there. You can do that now that on the Rock Pi 4 (running the RK3399). Everything has been upstreamed too my knowledge. Rockchip is currently in the process of up-streaming support for the RK3588(S), so it will be some months until a purely generic ARM OS will be bootable. Though in both their provided images, and in a generic ARM OS, it may be advantages to apply their provided device tree overlays (eg, switch the default PCIe Gen 1 to Gen 2. Support for some Raspberry peripherals).

Green0Photon t1_j5h8jbc wrote on January 23, 2023 at 12:03 AM

!!!

These mag have quite a shot, then!

And maybe someone will be smart enough to sell them preflashed.

cAtloVeR9998 t1_j5hl796 wrote on January 23, 2023 at 1:30 AM

Also note that with the SPI firmware installed, NVMe booting “just works”