On: State of Embedded: Q4 2025 Overview

[zokier]

Are there any recent ARM SoCs that are fully supported by mainline kernel and don't have weird proprietary blobby boot chain?

[msgilligan → zokier]

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...

[zokier → msgilligan]

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...

[aurintex → msgilligan]

And the NPU part is also in the mainline kernel https://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2025/07/rockchip-npu-update-6-w...

[mfuzzey → zokier]

NXP i.MX, TI, STM32MP

[msgilligan → mfuzzey]

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.

[cogman10 → zokier]

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.