<chewitt> Amlogic devs started to send patches to the mailing list, but..
<chewitt> let's just say their idea of a good submission and the maintainers idea .. differ
<chewitt> so they are still stuck at getting the clocks patches right, and *everything* else depends on that
<chewitt> so right now upstream isn't usable
<chewitt> Heiner had earlier made his own patches, but his use-case was HomeAssistant so you might find things like HDMI are missing (not something he needed)
<chewitt> until more goes upstream, you are stuck with the vendor kernel
<chewitt> SC2 (an S4 board) are an evolution of the SM1 family, but there are enough differences to mean you won't boot anything using SM1 dtb files
<chewitt> so your choice of kernels is vendor, vendor, or vendor
<chewitt> on the positive, Amlogic has lurched forwards to Linux 5.4 and done lots of code cleanup
<chewitt> on the negative, that means they removed support for *everything* before S4 platforms, so you can't run their 5.4 codebase with S922X/A311D etc.
<chewitt> and of course they still use their proprietary drm frameworks so all the media drivers are complex and unintelligible
<chewitt> at the current rate of progress I wouldn't expect to see any real S4 support until 2024
<chewitt> and I'm not aware of any plan to upstream T7 support (A311D2)
<chewitt> so nice boards like VIM4 (which also require all-new HDMI and USB drivers and load all the media firmwares from secure-world) aren't likely to see upstream support
<Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> super informative, thanks chewitt
<Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> I've recently against my will shoehorned an old 5.4.120ish of khadas' amlogic 5.4 kvim4 tree onto a vim3L -- to prove a point with their sound/soc/amlogic/auge -- which does work very minimally (no HDMI, no ethernet, but USB works, and the auge stuff works)
<Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> we will eventually add a legacy build of Armbian for the VIM4 with the 5.4 vendor kernel, although my motivation for such is near zero...
<Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> ... we do need some 8Gb RAM Amlogic board. That HDMI in is interesting as well...
<chewitt> I could do the same with LE, but the rest of the team would (rightly) fight the ifdef nonsense required to add more vendor u-boot/kernel fluff back into our buildsystem
<chewitt> it has mostly been exorcised in recent times and consensus is that's a good thing
<chewitt> and I'm not sure I have the energy or desire to pick that fight for one board
<chewitt> or the energy and desire to maintain a fork for it
<Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> yep. Armbian's slate is not clean (at all, given that rockchip android 5.10 shit) but that VIM4 kernel doesn't rebase cleanly on top of anything -- it's guaranteed pain to maintain or once-in-left-to-rot for sure.
<Armbian-Discord> <r​pardini> Portisch & co gotta be working it for CE -- let them do it
<chewitt> I was going to state .. I would pick the CE kernel over the Khadas one as it will have been worked over to support more devices
<chewitt> although "fixes" will always be lipstick on a pig
<Armbian-Discord> <a​deepv> chewitt thanks for explaining. unfortunately I have the next JetHub board on s4 😦
<Armbian-Discord> <n​armstrong> @adeepv sorry :-p
<Armbian-Discord> <a​deepv> As far as I understand, things are even worse with uboot?)
<Armbian-Discord> <a​deepv> amlogic at least switched to v2019
<Armbian-Discord> <n​armstrong> @adeepv yes, but adding support for u-boot is quite easy if we have basic linux support
<Armbian-Discord> <n​armstrong> @adeepv but yeah amlogic u-boot is barely usable, I never used iy ^^
<Armbian-Discord> <n​armstrong> but it's a good reference for code, because simpler, I used a lot of uboot code for display
<Armbian-Discord> <a​deepv> I really need to port the parsing of the aml partition. but I don’t quite understand how to combine amlogic logic with mainline u-boot
<Armbian-Discord> <a​deepv> we use some unifykey logic (this like efuse but on emmc)
<Armbian-Discord> <n​armstrong> you'll need to write a custom block logic using the NAND partition scheme but opening eMMC user partition instead
<Armbian-Discord> <n​armstrong> under linux you can use dm so no hack needed
<Armbian-Discord> <a​deepv> no, only u-boot logic.
<Armbian-Discord> <n​armstrong> hopefully we'll manage to get S4 clocks upstreamed and the rest will flow quite fast
<Armbian-Discord> <a​deepv> there is still hope for amlogic engineers? 🙂
<Armbian-Discord> <T​winzysFX> you guys know where i can go to get support
<chewitt> adeepv: like all software engineering projects, we have have S4 support "fast or cheap" .. never both :)
<chewitt> (and so far everyone picked cheap)