I have a RK3588 Reform running Debian Trixie. I’d love to be running a kernel with support for the updated Mali G610 display drivers, so that 2k/4k video playback runs well outside of Chromium, better (or, in some cases, any) 3D support, and so on. I’m given to understand that Trixie is pinned to a version of the Linux kernel which will not support these drivers, and so if I stick with Debian, it will be some time (potentially, years) before I’m able to get this support.
I’ve read that Armbian has better support for the newer Mali GPUs, like the G610 on the RK3588.
Does anyone have any experiences or guides they can share on getting Armbian running on a RK3588 Reform? Are there any big sticking points you all can think of in trying to do so?
Are there any other approaches you all can think of that I might investigate in getting better drivers running for my Mali G610 GPU?
There is a linux-image-mnt-reform-arm64 package available in trixie-backports that includes a bunch of patches atop the upstream kernel to make RK3588 run smoothly, i.e. with working vulkan.
Not sure if there is support for hardware accelerated video playback though…
Which feature exactly are you looking for? Hardware video decoding? You currently have this running in chromium but not with a desktop video player like mpv or vlc? That sounds odd.
That is usually more a question of your mesa version and not the kernel.
Not exactly. Debian Trixie follows the 6.12 longterm stable branch of the kernel which is currently at 6.12.63. It will receive updates from this branch. Which driver/feature is it exactly you are talking about? The kernel from reform.d.n is already heavily patched.
Debian releases roughly every 2 years, so the release of Forky will probably happen in 2027. If you want a more recent kernel version, then you could use trixie-backports but it’s still not quite clear to me what you are missing with 6.12. In general: kernel 6.12 does not support rk3588 on the classic reform well. You posted this in the MNT Reform channel so i suppose this is not about the pocket reform? I have the pocket reform running well with Trixie, kernel 6.12 and rk3588 but i didn’t manage to get it to work with rk3588 on the DSI version of classic reform. I assume you have the non-DSI version?
Can you give a source of that? What kernel version do they have?
I think before putting the work in to get another distro working on the reform, you should make sure that this is really fixing your problem. What makes you believe that it is so?
If you are looking for 3D support, then you are probably looking for a more recent version of mesa. Debian Trixie has version 25 but there is a backport to Trixie of version 25.3. Which version of mesa has the feature you need?
Another approach would be to port the changes of either mesa or linux that you do need back to the version in Trixie.