I am generally happy with my Orange Pi 5, but I have flip flopped between the vendor kernel and a mainline kernel depending on what purpose the OPi5 is serving at that moment.
Does the vendor kernel support more of the board's peripherals than the mainline kernel?
Had that issue with some Odroid boards, where the vendor kernel supported MFC hardware acceleration but the vanilla kernel didn't/doesn't. I'd like to avoid that
Yes, that’s the main reason to run the vendor kernel. Mainline support is improving all the time though.
I believe I needed the vendor kernel to use video through the USB-C port, and to use the HW acceleration for transcoding in Jellyfin. This situation may have changed since my last attempts.
I think https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35... is still the best reference for mainline support of the RK3588. As you say, DP alt mode and video encoding are totally unsupported right now. Hopefully things will keep progressing; it's a very feature-rich platform, and I think it will have some legs even after it is no longer the compute king (e.g., the RK3688 is on the horizon).
I am generally happy with my Orange Pi 5, but I have flip flopped between the vendor kernel and a mainline kernel depending on what purpose the OPi5 is serving at that moment.
There’s also a fairly usable UEFI implementation.
Does the vendor kernel support more of the board's peripherals than the mainline kernel?
Had that issue with some Odroid boards, where the vendor kernel supported MFC hardware acceleration but the vanilla kernel didn't/doesn't. I'd like to avoid that
Yes, that’s the main reason to run the vendor kernel. Mainline support is improving all the time though.
I believe I needed the vendor kernel to use video through the USB-C port, and to use the HW acceleration for transcoding in Jellyfin. This situation may have changed since my last attempts.
I think https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35... is still the best reference for mainline support of the RK3588. As you say, DP alt mode and video encoding are totally unsupported right now. Hopefully things will keep progressing; it's a very feature-rich platform, and I think it will have some legs even after it is no longer the compute king (e.g., the RK3688 is on the horizon).