upstreaming status - u-boot and linux kernel

[colemickens]

Hi,

I've ordered a LicheePi4a, but am worried if this board is going to see upstream support?

I've found some patches, targetting upstream, for Pi4a, but I don't know the status of them.

I'm also quite accustomed to hacky, old u-boot builds - so I'm also curious about the plans for upstreaming u-boot support.

Thanks! I'm very excited to get my hands on a faster RISCV64 board!

[AKeen12344]

Looks like there's basic mainline Linux support for the Lichee Pi 4a and parent SOC with Linux 6.5 added within the last month-ish.

Most Sipeed patches zip under the kernel_patch folder actually look like they are for a Yocto toolchain, with some unrelated patches in there as well.

Edit: Also there's an Imagination GPU under the hood of the TH1520 which has basic (actually broken) Mesa support and some upstreamed firmware files for a completely different jumble of letters for an architecture which basically nobody knows anything about. And the upstream kernel code depends on ARM64 as part of it's kconfig file.

[ZhanYF]

Regarding to U-Boot there seems to be primitive support on the mainline but the mainline version has to be chainloaded using the vendor u-boot either via eMMC storage or from tftp.

https://lore.kernel.org/u-boot/20230708112435.23583-1-dlan@gentoo.org/

From U-Boot docs: https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/board/thead/lpi4a.html

Currently, we rely on vendor u-boot to initialize the clock, pinctrl subsystem, and chain load the mainline u-boot image either via tftp or emmc storage, then bootup from it.

[colemickens]

I'm glad I didn't hold my breath on this platform. I wish vendors understood how much they hurt themselves by not putting more effort into mainlining this kind of stuff.