I have a PineNote tablet which is built on a RK3566 and I quite enjoy it. It's a neat ereader/tablet hybrid that runs regular Linux (Debian) and has an e-ink screen
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2025
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It's a decent sbc for low performance things. I've seen them used in just about every chinese android car head unit system.
open source competitor
I have been under the impression that they are rather closed, like almost everything else in the ARM A-series universe.
I know that they are open source to some extent. I'm 99% sure that this quote has not been updated to include the 3588, but this is on Wikipedia:
Rockchip provides open source software on GitHub[19] and maintains a wiki Linux SDK website[20] to offer free downloads of SoC hardware documents and software development resources as well as third-party development kits info. The chipsets available are RK3399, RK3288, RK3328 and RK3036.
Here is their stuff:
https://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Main_Page
Here is the toolkit for converting AI stuff to work on their NPU. It looks like they support several 2-3b models including multimodal qwen v2:
https://github.com/airockchip/rknn-toolkit2/
https://github.com/airockchip/rknn-llm
Their own documentation says they do not provide source for ATF (arm trusted firmware). So it is probably just as bad as the Intel/AMD Management Engine fascist takeover junk running in the background.
Their main document is the TRM PDF. The one for the newest RK3588 is on gitlab along with the regular mechanical and pinout documentation. At a tertiary glance, it looks comprehensive with over three thousand pages of registers, addressing, and peripherals with timing diagrams. It is way over my head to say how complete or useful it is.
Collabora is actively working on upstreaming the Radaxa Rock 5B
The TRMs are at least available online
meta-rockchip, Linux kernel, and u-boot have upstreamed support for (most) interfaces - check upstream status here: https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588/notes-for-rockchip-3588/-/blob/main/mainline-status.md
ARM itself has uploaded the firmware for the GPU to linux-firmware
There's work on the NPU going pretty well
I've seen some work on an open TEE, but I don't need that for my project, so I haven't looked much into it
Rockchip themselves are... Questionably open
For the software side, I've found them decent. I do have to run latest and greatest Linux kernel and u-boot on our projects
The hardware team wasn't so happy for your fab level, but we managed to get some designs working based off SoMs from Firefly