At the beginning of the year Rockchip introduced a new System-on-a-Chip, the RK3576. With the main target being industrial applications, it is less of a powerhouse than the RK3588, but it still reuses many components. With the help of ArmSom we managed to get some early boards and started working on implementing upstream support for this platform earlier than the previous generations.

Detlev Casanova has been very busy getting the minimal required features upstream to boot the ArmSom Sige5, also known as Banana Pi BPI-M5 Pro. The first bits of that work have landed in the 6.12 LTS kernel: The board comes with a new PMIC, an I2C variant of the SPI chip usually used by the RK3588 boards. With the SPI variant already supported, only minor adaptions were needed to get that working.

A bit more work was needed for the new clock and reset controller (CRU), which tends to change its registers layout from one Rockchip generation to the next, and the RK3576 is no exception in that regard. In addition to the CRU, the power domain handling is quite essential and also landed in time for 6.12. On top of these internal low-level requirements, Detlev managed to land support for a couple of different options to provide the root filesystem: eMMC, SD card, and SDIO as well as network support all landed in the LTS release.

There's also landed controller support for I2C and SPI, analog inputs, the watchdog, pin multiplexing, and last but not least, GPU support. Unfortunately some quite essential bits did not make it: The UART devicetree (DT) binding and GPIO support will only arrive in 6.13. This means the DT for the RK3576 and Sige5 will also arrive in 6.13 instead of 6.12.

Right now only a few features are missing to get the RK3576 on par with the RK3588, and most of them are already being worked on: OTP memory, USB, PCIe, and HDMI support are all WIP and are expected to land soon. You can find the latest status on the RK3576 Kernel Status Matrix.

As you can see, upstreaming reasonably good support for RK3576 was a smooth and fast ride thanks to all the prior work for the RK3588. We generally recommend that anyone start upstreaming early to get these synergy effects.

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