I came across Icenowy's patchset for current stable Linux version (currently 4.13) here. Since it contains almost every out of tree functionality for 32 bit Allwinner SoCs, should we just use it here? But beware, at least HDMI functionality there lags a bit - Armbian uses newer patches with audio enabled...

I see some non-relevant patches there (i.e. for V3s, R40, V40) and really obsolete stuff like this, but we can probably pull some things from there (i.e. DVFS).

In any case we already have 100+ patches for a stable branch (sunxi-next) and I would prefer to mostly leave it as is until 4.14 (so we could clean up maybe 1/4 - 1/3 of the patches), and at least right now I expect a stable release still with 4.13.

yeah, I was thinking mostly about DVFS and all that thermal stuff. I think this is most important feature still missing in Armbian mainline.