Rockchip

7 Articles

GitHub Disables Rockchip’s Linux MPP Repository After DMCA Request

January 5, 2026 by 64 Comments

Recently GitHub disabled the Rockchip Linux MPP repository, following a DMCA takedown request from the FFmpeg team. As of writing the affected repository remains unavailable. At the core of this issue is the Rockchip MPP framework, which provides hardware-accelerated video operations on Rockchip SoCs. Much of the code for this was lifted verbatim from FFmpeg, with the allegation being that this occurred with the removal of the original copyright notices and authors. The Rockchip MPP framework was further re-licensed from LGPL 2.1 to the Apache license.

Most egregious of all is perhaps that the FFmpeg team privately contacted Rockchip about this nearly two years ago, with clearly no action taken since. Thus FFmpeg demands that Rockchip either undoes these actions that violate the LGPL, or remove all infringing files.

This news and further context is also covered by [Brodie Robertson] in a video. What’s interesting is that Rockchip in public communications and in GitHub issues are clearly aware of this license issue, but seem to defer dealing with it until some undefined point in the future. Clearly that was the wrong choice by Rockchip, though it remains a major question what will happen next. [Brodie] speculates that Rockchip will keep ignoring the issue, but is hopeful that he’ll be proven wrong.

Unfortunately, these sort of long-standing license violations aren’t uncommon in the open source world.

Continue reading “GitHub Disables Rockchip’s Linux MPP Repository After DMCA Request” →

UEFI On ARM? More Likely Than You Think

December 4, 2025 by 34 Comments

Now, Rock 5 ITX+ is no x86 board, sporting an ARM Rockchip RK3588 on its ITX form-factor PCB, but reading this blog post’s headline might as well give you the impression. [Venn] from the [interfacinglinux.com] blog tells us about their journey bringing up UEFI on this board, thanks to the [EDK2-RK3588] project. Why? UEFI is genuinely nice for things like OS switching or system reconfiguration on the fly, and in many aspects, having a system management/configuration interface for your SBC sure beats the “flash microSD card and pray” traditional approach.

In theory, a UEFI binary runs like any other firmware. In theory. For [Venn], the journey wasn’t as smooth, which made it very well worth documenting. There’s maybe not a mountain, but at least a small hill of caveats: having to use a specific HDMI port to see the configuration output, somehow having to flash it onto SPI flash chip specifically (and managing to do that through Gnome file manager of all things), requiring a new enough kernel for GPU hardware acceleration… Yet, it works, it really does.

Worth it? From the looks of it, absolutely. One thing [Venn] points out is, the RK3588 is getting a lot of its features upstreamed, so it’s aiming to become a healthy chip for many a Linux goal. From the blog post comments, we’ve also learned that there’s a RPi UEFI port, even if for a specific CPU revision of the Model 5B, it’s still a nifty thing to know. Want to learn more about UEFI? You can start here or here, and if you want a fun hands-on example, you could very well start by running DOOM.

Finally Putting The RK1 Through Its Paces

December 9, 2024 by 17 Comments

The good folks at Turing Pi sent me a trio of RK1 modules to put through their paces, to go along with the single unit I bought myself. And the TLDR, if you need some real ARM processing power, and don’t want to spend an enterprise budget, a Turing Pi 2 filled with RK1s is a pretty compelling solution. And the catch? It’s sporting the Rockchip RK3588 processor, which means there are challenges with kernel support.

For those in the audience that haven’t been following the Turing Pi project, let’s recap. The Turing Pi 1 was a mini ITX carrier board for the original Raspberry Pi compute module, boasting 7 nodes connected with onboard Gigabit.

That obviously wasn’t enough power, and once Raspberry Pi released the CM4, the Turing Pi 2 was conceived, boasting 4 slots compatible with the Nvidia Jetson compute units, as well as the Raspberry Pi CM4 with a minimal adapter. We even covered it shortly after the Kickstarter. And now we have the RK1, which is an 8-core RK3588 slapped on a minimal board, pin compatible with the Nvidia Jetson boards. Continue reading “Finally Putting The RK1 Through Its Paces” →

A Clean Linux Installation For An Android TV Box

September 3, 2024 by 21 Comments

Although Android technically runs on top of Linux, generally most Android devices abstract away the underlying Linux-ness of these machines. In theory this is a good thing; we wouldn’t necessarily want to live in a world where we have to log in to a command-line interface just to make a phone call. But too much abstraction often needlessly restricts the capabilities of the underlying hardware. [Murray] a.k.a [Green Bug-Eyed Monster] has an Android TV box with just such a problem, as the Android OS included with it allows for watching TV just fine, but with a few tweaks it can run a full Linux installation instead, turning it into a much more versatile machine.

This specific Android TV box is based on the Rockchip 3566, a popular single-board computer used in a wide array of products. As such it is one of the easier targets for transforming a limited TV machine into a fully capable desktop computer. The first step is to compile an Armbian image for the machine, in this case using an x86 installation of Ubuntu to cross-compile for the ARM-based machine. With a viable image in hand, there’s an option to either solder on a microSD slot to the included pins on the computer’s PCB or to flash the image directly to the on-board eMMC storage by tricking the machine into thinking that the eMMC is missing. Either option will bring you into a full-fledged Linux environment, with just a few configuration steps to take to get it running like any other computer.

[Murray] began this process as an alternative to paying the inflated prices of Raspberry Pis over the past few years, and for anyone in a similar predicament any computer with the Rockchip 3566 processor in it could be a potential target for a project like this. You might need to make a few tweaks to the compile options and hardware, but overall the process should be similar. And if you don’t have an RK3566, don’t fret too much. We’ve seen plenty of other Android TV boxes turned into similar devices like this one which runs RetroPie instead.

Atari Introduces A New Old Console

September 11, 2023 by 29 Comments

Readers of a certain age no doubt remember the Atari 2600 — released in 1977, the 8-bit system helped establish the ground rules for gaming consoles as we know them today, all while sporting a swanky faux wood front panel designed to make the system look at home in contemporary living rooms.

Now, nearly 50 years later, the Atari 2600 is back. The new system, imaginatively named the 2600+, looks exactly like the original system, albeit at around 80% scale. It will also work the same way, as the system will actually be able to play original Atari 2600 and 7800 cartridges. This is something of a surprise when compared to the previously released retro consoles from the likes of Sony and Nintendo, as they were all limited to whatever games the company decided to pack into them. Of course, this probably has something to do with the fact that Atari has been selling newly manufactured 2600 games for some time now.