Looking for more information on M7 capabilities

ArmSoM Rockchip design BPI-M7/BPI-W3/BPI-AIM7(RK3588)
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I am looking for any real-world information that might be available on the M7. Information for this board is very sparse. As usual, BPI talks up the board’s technical capabilities without speaking toward what capabilities are actually accessible to the user:

I am considering one for use as a home media player. So read these questions with that in mind.

  1. Is it possible to boot from MicroSD and/or NVME? The main review BPI links to suggests not.
  2. Does any software expose the hardware HEVC encoder? Is there an ffmpeg build (outside some languishing github fork somewhere) that can access it?
  3. What software exposes the hardware decoders? Can VLC use it? Can Kodi? When I ask that, I mean can VLC in any modern OS build use it, not the patched VLC included in the ancient Debian 11 image BPI offers.
  4. What kernels are available, and who maintains them? I’m asking this with the assumption that proper mainline support is likely not forthcoming given Rockchip’s dislike of open source.
  5. Has anyone seen more than 900KiB/s real-world transfer speed on the “2.5GB” ethernet?

Honestly I’m thinking that a simple Raspberry PI 5 is likely better supported now in Pi OS and with mainline support in 6.18. But again, I’m willing to be shown this is incorrect.

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  1. Of course you can. You can check the documentation here: 2. Flash Image | ArmSoM docs
  2. 3 . Our product is officially supported by Armbian and various images are available. Please forgive us, our original firmware is outdated. Bananapi M7 - Armbian
  3. Kernel 5.1 and Kernel 6.1 are available at GitHub - armbian/linux-rockchip: Customized version of the Linux kernel maintained by Armbian team to support Rockchip SoCs. The mainline has also been committed:linux/arch/arm64/boot/dts/rockchip/rk3588-armsom-sige7.dts at master · torvalds/linux · GitHub armsom-sige7 is BPI-M7.
  4. Of course it exceeds that; our gigabit network tests consistently show speeds above 940 ms using iperf.
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If you need a HTPC i would take anything but that device. The common problem with all that china-stuff is: great hardware, worst software. The specs are awesome, if it would work with mainline linux. I also check all few weeks the situation at Making sure you're not a bot! and it is going forward but… slowly. As you already mentioned, RK gives a sh… about mainline support. As long as there is no H264/265 support in mainline, i would stay away from that device. The good thing tho is, there is a patch that is sent … the question is, when will it be approved :slight_smile:

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Mainline linux only supports decoders for v4l2-request (stateless). Stateless encoding is not yet supported. For v4l2-m2m (statefull) it does have some encoder support. Rockchip video de/encoding is stateless, so you will need to wait until someone implements encoding, or choose another brand soc.

Or use the rockchip kernel (mpp) instead.