Hi — I've been following this thread, the 100 Mbit ethernet cap and the silent mainline boot hang especially. I ended up doing a full mainline bring-up of the 4A on 6.18.38 and got gigabit ethernet working properly (RX/TX), plus the boot hang sorted, so I wanted to share the whole patch series in case it helps here.
Full disclosure: I'm not a kernel developer by trade — I got most of this working with a lot of help from AI coding agents, leaning hard on the BSP 5.15 as the source of truth. In my own testing everything seems stable, but I'd genuinely welcome anyone who actually knows this stuff to review the patches and tell me what I got wrong or did in a hacky way. No egos here — I'm sharing it in case it's useful and to get feedback, not claiming it's perfect. 🙂
What works (confirmed on hardware):
HDMI KMS display (DE33/DE3.5 + TCON-TV + DW-HDMI 2.0 + Inno PHY) — 720p/1080p, clean VSU8 scaling
GPU Mali-G57 (Panfrost) — accelerated (KDE Plasma Wayland)
HDMI audio (i2s2 → dw-hdmi) — PCM out to the TV
Ethernet GMAC1 (YT8531 PHY, RGMII) — full gigabit RX/TX
WiFi AP6256 (BCM43456, brcmfmac, SDIO) — 2.4/5 GHz scan + assoc
reboot / poweroff (sunxi_wdt / AXP717)
AFBC scanout (v350 AFBD decoder)
USB — the 4 rear ports (all USB 2.0; the board doesn't wire the SoC's USB3) — HID + mass storage, hotplug
THS thermal sensors (5 zones: cpu_l / cpu_b / gpu / npu / ddr) + 110 °C critical trip
CPU cpufreq/DVFS (little cluster up to 1.416 GHz, big cluster up to 1.8 GHz) + thermal throttling
GPU devfreq/DVFS (Panfrost, 150–600 MHz) + thermal throttling
HDMI HPD / hotplug (native, no force)
Known not working / help wanted:
eMMC — not tested (I don't have a module). I saw the mmc2: error -110 reports earlier in the thread; happy to dig into it with anyone who has eMMC.
Hardware video decode (VPU) — no driver in 6.18 yet (software decode works).
Suspend/hibernate — untested.
4GB variant — expected to work out of the box (the bootloader auto-detects the RAM size and fills in /memory at boot; verified over UART on the 2GB board). I only own the 2GB variant, so if you have the 4GB one, a free -h confirmation would be very welcome.
NVMe SSD — untested, no drive here. Everything so far has only run from microSD.
Freshness note: the cpufreq/thermal/GPU-devfreq block landed this very week and is still under soak testing on my board — everything else has more mileage. I'll report anything that shakes out in this thread.
Repo / patches: https://github.com/ut-slayer/orangepi-4a-mainline
It's a git format-patch series (~106 patches) on top of 6.18.38 vanilla, plus a defconfig and the board .dts. The README groups the patches by intended destination: generic sunxi fixes (pinctrl, watchdog vs PSCI, AXP717 poweroff, a RESET_GPIO/mmc-pwrseq bug affecting any sunxi board with SDIO WiFi), the HDMI KMS display series (largely ported/adapted from the minimyth2 / Justin Suess H728 work, with original authorship kept in the patch headers), the A523 CPU CCU + thermal + DVFS, board integration (dts + defconfig), and a few U-Boot BSP workarounds that go away with mainline U-Boot.
Coming next: a ready-to-flash Debian 13 (Trixie) image with accelerated Panfrost and KDE Plasma on Wayland — I'll share it in this thread once it's had a bit more soak testing.
Happy to open a PR against armbian/build (sun55iw3 family) with the board dts + defconfig + patches if there's interest. Feedback and testers welcome!
Credits: minimyth2 / Justin Suess for the H728 display groundwork, and the linux-sunxi community.
Cheers.
