Hello Armbian community,

 

I am working on adding support for a new RK3568 board to Armbian.

 

Besides the board support, there are some hardware-specific kernel driver patches, for example:

 

- RS485 driver modifications
- TP2815 related driver changes
- GT9xx touchscreen driver changes
- Other hardware-specific drivers

 

These drivers are only required for this hardware platform.

 

What is the recommended way to maintain these driver patches in Armbian?

 

Should they be submitted together with the board support?

 

Or should they be maintained separately and applied through:

userpatches/kernel/rk35xx-vendor-6.1/

 

before building Armbian?

 

How do other board maintainers usually handle hardware-specific kernel drivers?

 

Thanks.

Edited September 16Sep 16 by Boardcon-Liuy

Hi.

 

If those changes are compatible with other hw (for example you are adding a new driver) these changes can be sent to https://github.com/armbian/linux-rockchip

 

If your changes are likely to break other boards, then the better way is to create your own family, hence having independent kernel packages with different name.

Example: https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/main/config/boards/recomputer-rk3588-devkit.conf

Which refers to https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/main/config/sources/families/seeed-rk3588.conf

This will also allow custom kernel config: https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/main/config/kernel/linux-seeed-rk3588-vendor.config

 

It is not ideal to have a individual family for a single board but sometimes the hw is very customized, breaking other implementations, making this necessary.

 

Hi,

Got it. Thank you very much for your reply and guidance.

Best regards.