During FOSDEM 2026, I gave a talk on the progress of mainline support for Rockchip SoCs over the past year. There was so much to cover that the 20-minute slot was not nearly enough to mention everything. However, it served as a good opportunity to reflect on the big developments, do a victory lap, and have a brief look into the future.

The recording of my talk, No Line Like Mainline: Update On The Fully Mainline Software Stack For Rockchip SoCs, is available for viewing and download on the FOSDEM website, along with the slides as a PDF.

While highlighting what Collabora has contributed, I also included the community's progress at large. Even if you're unfamiliar with the landscape of Rockchip SoCs, the talk is accessible, as I quickly went over the general naming scheme of the chips, and explained the motivations behind choosing Rockchip. I also dedicated a few slides to showcasing that mainline supported SoCs do not need any device specific images.

I gave four topics a special mention: Vulkan 1.4 Conformance on the RK3588's Mali GPU, the "Rocket" Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver, progress in multimedia capabilities, and the arrival of RK3576 support.

On that last point, I felt it necessary to justify why RK3576 is an interesting target. Many more casual observers seem to see an SoC with older licensed core designs and miss the forest for the trees in the process. The talk details how RK3576 is more than a cost-optimised little brother: it's a stepping stone towards future designs.

We currently live in a world where consumer electronics have ballooned in cost. People, as well as companies, try to make their existing devices last for longer in response to the challenges posed by the current economic reality. A talk on an affordable line-up of processors that is gaining long-term-sustainable software support couldn't have been presented at a better point in time, in my humble opinion.