Collabora is proud to share that we've partnered with Flipper Devices to work together on building an open Linux platform for hardware hackers. The long-awaited Flipper One will be built on the Rockchip RK3576, and Flipper has chosen Collabora as its Open Source software partner to make it happen.

Their previous, much-loved Flipper Zero: a pocket-sized multi-tool for hardware hackers, with a focus on access control systems, made plenty of noise and proved that Open Source and curious minds can work wonders. The new Flipper One operates at a fundamentally different layer of the stack, demands high-performance computing, and brings a whole new set of challenges.

Why the Rockchip RK3576, and why now?

Choosing a silicon platform for a Linux-first product is not just a hardware decision. It is a long-term bet on software maturity, community health, and the ability to ship and maintain a product without being held hostage to a vendor BSP that goes stale the moment the ink dries on the purchase order.

That is precisely why the RK3576 makes sense for the Flipper One, and why Collabora's upstream work on this platform was a decisive factor in Flipper Devices' choice.

Over the past several years, Collabora engineers have invested heavily in bringing the Rockchip ecosystem into the mainline Linux kernel. From graphics and display pipelines to multimedia acceleration and power management, the work has been done in the open, reviewed by the broader community, and merged where it belongs: upstream. The foundational SoC enablement, display stack, GPU, VPU and so much more of the RK3576 are already upstream or on their way to make a product like the Flipper One viable without a mountain of out-of-tree patches.

For Flipper Devices, this matters enormously. The Flipper One will a platform that keeps up with the world. That is only possible when the hardware is properly supported upstream.

The leap in capability is also hard to overstate. The Flipper Zero is built around an STM32WB55 microcontroller, a dual-core Arm Cortex-M4 running at 64 MHz, with 256 KB of SRAM and 1 MB of flash. The Flipper firmware team has done impressive things within those constraints. But it is a microcontroller. The Flipper One, by contrast, will be built around the RK3576: an octa-core application processor with gigabytes of RAM, a Mali GPU with full Open Source driver, hardware-accelerated video decode, and an NPU for on-device inference workloads.

Heading to Embedded Recipes in Nice next week? We'll have a working prototype of the Flipper One at our table on May 28. Stop by for a hands-on look!

Open Source as a product strategy

Collabora's "Open First" philosophy aligns naturally with what Flipper Devices has built its Flipper Zero on: transparency, community, and hardware that its users can actually understand and extend. The Flipper Zero spawned a thriving ecosystem of third-party firmware and tools precisely because the platform was open. The Flipper One, built on a fully mainlined Linux stack, takes that ethos further.

With upstream support in place, Flipper One users and the broader community can contribute, audit, and build on a foundation that is not going anywhere. Security researchers in particular will appreciate a platform where the software stack is as open to inspection as the hardware itself.

What this means for OEMs considering the RK3576

The Flipper One is a compelling proof point for any OEM evaluating the RK3576. Collabora's upstream investment means that the cost of bringing a new product to market on this platform is substantially lower than it would be on silicon without mature mainline support. There is no need to maintain a private kernel fork, no scramble to rebase vendor patches on every LTS release, and no dependency on a chipmaker's support lifecycle that may not match your product's.

If you are building a Linux-based product and want a platform with real upstream momentum behind it, we would be glad to talk.

Current status of RK3576 Mainline Kernel support

RK3576 mainline support is already in pretty good shape — all the major components are working. Right now we're focused on power management and USB DP Alt-mode support. Hardware video decoding and the NPU aren't fully working yet. And there's still one last binary blob left in the boot chain — the so-called DDR Trainer.

For the current mainline status of the RK3476, see: https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588/notes-for-rockchip-3576/-/blob/main/mainline-status.md

A note on how we got here

It's worth saying clearly: the upstream support for the RK3576 is not solely Collabora's work. Open Source is a community effort, and the Rockchip ecosystem has benefited from contributions by engineers at Rockchip, ArmSom, and many key individual contributors across the kernel, U-Boot, and Mesa communities. We're proud of what our team has contributed, but the platform's strength comes from all of that work together.

Our ability to enable the RK3576 quickly didn't come out of nowhere. Much of the groundwork was laid through Collabora's extensive upstream work on the RK3588, Rockchip's flagship SoC. Over the past few years, our engineers contributed crucial enablement work across the stack: display subsystem support in the kernel, GPU enablement in Mesa (Panfrost and PanVK), power management infrastructure, and the integration work that makes these components function as a cohesive platform.

These efforts meant we arrived at the RK3576 with mature tooling, established relationships, and a deep understanding of Rockchip's hardware architecture. What Collabora brings to Flipper Devices is the ability to navigate that ecosystem, know where the gaps are, how to close them, and how to do it in a way that lands upstream rather than accumulating as technical debt.

We're looking forward to sharing more about the work ahead. In the meantime, if you're an OEM evaluating silicon for a Linux-first product and wondering whether upstream support should be part of your decision: it should. Come talk to us.