Support for the RDA8810PL

For Developers
1

I'm currently curious if there's any interest in adding a device tree for the RDA8810PL.

The chipset has only been used in two Orange Pi devices, the i96 and the 2g-iot.

Hardware specs can be found here:

Of interest are 256mb ram and 512mb flash, wireless b/g/n and the 2g-iot has a built-in GSM modem.

The mainline Linux kernel added support in 5.0rc1,
and the device is very cheap on several websites.

2

This would require a new OpenWrt target, which isn't quite as simple as merely adding a new device to an already existing one.

Looking at it from the outside, this device is rather slow/ low-end from a linux-on-arm perspective (compared to other SBCs, e.g. the sunxi/ H3 based orange pi zero), in comparison to other OpenWrt target this might not be so bad though.

Issues that will be detrimental for supporting this hardware would be:

  • no ethernet
  • unsupported wireless
  • not really suitable for routing - and OpenWrt isn't quite ideal to leverage multimedia aspects or GPIO features (as in, it'll be more a source-only target for semi-developers, than something to download and flash)

Neither of these are hard blockers, nor do they need to be blockers at all, but it's still something to keep in mind and adjust expectations accordingly.

1 Like
3

I shall see how I get on, I see someone has recently got Debian Bullseye booting but with a really old kernel.