Are there any recent ARM SoCs that are fully supported by mainline kernel and don't have weird proprietary blobby boot chain?
Are there any recent ARM SoCs that are fully supported by mainline kernel and don't have weird proprietary blobby boot chain?
Well, a 5-year-old chip may not count as "recent" but the RK-3588 boot chain is "almost fully open-source" [1]. And it seems like it took a major amount of effort (from Collabora, others) to get it this far. I don't know of any equivalent or newer chips that are "more" open, but would love to hear if there are.
[1] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2024/02/21/almo...
Yeah, Collabora has done good job on rk chips, but even then there are still missing bits and pieces. At least for rk3588 they are documented nicely: https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...
And the NPU part is also in the mainline kernel https://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2025/07/rockchip-npu-update-6-w...
NXP i.MX, TI, STM32MP
What are the most recent and/or highest performance of these?
Update: And mainline support and lack of proprietary boot blobs are two separate criteria. I've heard that NXP offers the former but not the latter.
RK stuff I believe is the closest. I believe it still has a binary blob for the GPU but generally a lot of the other stuff is mainline.
I've not seen any other ARM provider come close to mainline support.