They do update their repositories for officially supported SBCs.

Of couse, such SBCs have an expiry date (which is also official), but this applies to any vendor, not only to them.

Additionally, they're one of the most engaging companies when it comes to community - just check their forums and see for yourself.

Anybody done some "diff - u [vanilla] [vendor] > patch" work for these SBCs to fork their kernel? Maybe keep it up to mainline?

I've performed a `git cherry -v` out of curiosity a month ago, and there were a few dozen commits (even reverts!).

While I think pretty much any programmer could reapply them, my guess is that in the long term, one needs to know how device drivers development works, in order to adapt to the kernel changes. But I'm not a kernel dev, so the maintenance could be easier.

Are you sure? I've worked with a myriad of ARM devices, and I would say that despite their small size, Hardkernel are one of the most responsive companies when I have had issues.

I say that as both a Gentoo and Kali ARM dev

I'm sure, just check available OS images for their old boards.

Hardware vendors hardly are the best sources for OS images, except maybe for very new boards. When I shop for a board I always look if it is supported by community driven projects such as Armbian, DietPI or even plain Debian.

Take a look here if your board is supported.

https://www.armbian.com/download/

https://dietpi.com/#download

Im excited to look at the wifi on the RP4! Any word on the chipset used for that?

On a more personal note - thank you for your service.

You got any advice for pulling the aircrack_ng/rtl8812au driver from github and making it into a patch for building in-kernel? I really like having signed-module verification, but I also really want this driver.

The credits at the end of the post thank folks who worked on the CYW43455 integration, which matchs up with the raspberry expectation of being a (former) Broadcom part.

Not from hardkernel. They have decent support.