Fred St-Pierre

What we have right now is, probably, exactly what you wanted to achieve:
Option 2 for building Option 3 for packaging This boils down to having all bootloader components built from source code as opposed to having to load binary blob from vendor in the process.
 
I am not an expert on ATF but I understand it as a firmware running in a secure zone of the processor with a set of interfaces (eg. PSCI for power control) that let it interact with the rest of the software.
Not using ATF would mean that one had to code those interfaces themselves.

Ran sbc-bench (thanks @tkaiser).
RockPI4B: http://ix.io/1UXk
ROC-RK3399-PC: http://ix.io/1UXl
Have only glanced over the results, but the Renegade Elite seems on par with the RockPI4B.
 
Still want to get 5.3.x to run properly and get the TPL from U-Boot v2019.10-x working before commiting a wip.
Hoping to get some time this weekend.

Ok great. I have the board in hand, full kit with PoE mezzanine and 256gb SSD onboard if ever you want to use me as a guinea pig. 

You can try to track here: https://github.com/rockchip-linux/kernel/commits/release-4.4 + https://github.com/armbian/build/commits/master/patch/kernel/rockchip-default
 
Not very human-friendly