@charlie_root >get an Rockchip board with an open design. >Pine64 Rockpro
No, the RockPro64 hardware designs are not published - they're proprietary.

Pine64 at least publishes schematics, which allows you to use the hardware as you can tell what each pin is for and allows basic repairs, but I wouldn't describe such arrangement as "open".

But that's not really software related.

It seems to be pretty difficult to actually get it to boot without proprietary software according to this blog post: https://stikonas.eu/wordpress/2019/09/15/blobless-boot-with-rockpro64/

In the article quite a bit of proprietary software is removed after downloading it, but I get the feeling that some still lurks.

The RockPro64 also uses LPDDR4 and I'm not sure if fully free raminit exists for that (I know such exists for certain memory controllers that handle DDR2 and DDR3, but none for DDR4).


>You could also use a copeboot/libtardboot borked machine
Now this is seething.

I have a librebooted-libre Thinkpad R400 (best laptop I've used) and multiple librebooted-libre KGPE-D16's and they work far better than any current Aarch64 SoC (plus I don't need to provide any proprietary software to get them to boot unlike most Aarch64 SoC's).

Why would I use something as crappy as Tianocore when the superior GNU Grub exists?