lucifercipher

Correct, the Tinkerboard as well as the MiQi show here another serious design flaw (Micro USB for DC-IN is the other): Not exposing one of the two available SoC's USB host ports and connecting all USB receptacles to the remaining host port via an internal USB hub. So if you want to connect anything bandwidth intensive forget about both highest performance (hub) and to use more than 1 USB port (shared bandwidth). For such use cases Tinkerboard is simply an overpriced fail
 
For any further tests you should switch to 'performance' (/etc/defaults/cpufreq) now since otherwise you get numbers without meaning anyway with kernel 4.4 (since so far no one knows which cpufreq tweaks Rockchip engineers implemented here)

I am going to attempt to put the reboot patch in there tonight and get some more dts work done, I'm afraid none of the rockchip wifi system interface is built into the 4.11 kernel.  I'll take a look at 4.12 to see how much work I want to put into it, and of course look at some other rockchip-oriented kernels to see if they have it implemented or not.  Remember we don't have working BT in the 4.4 either.  And then there's the sound issue, which should just be an ALSA configuration and maybe a PA fix, if someone else wanted to start looking into that.  ;-)

I understand where you are coming from. If it helps, the TinkerOS beta 1.8 release has addressed those problems.  Could be a reference perhaps? I did not find the source code for it.