BFE EngineeringandClaude Fable 5
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Decision/directive lines keep their dates and content, drop the name; hands-on confirmations become "confirmed by hand at the panel"; a dangling CLAUDE.md reference becomes "repo policy". Upstream vendor author attributions in the GPL kernel sources (MODULE_AUTHOR, copyright headers, LKML citations) are third-party legal attributions and stay. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018HUayid7W5w7jBdb9Rrj1K
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Driver provenance & openness ledger
Standing directive: every driver we run on the self-built 6.18 kernel must be open source we can read, harden, and bend — not a binary blob — and this applies to the drivers already ported, not just the new ones. This ledger records, for each, where the source came from and under what license. Every entry is GPL-2.0 kernel source; nothing here is a binary-only kernel module.
Legend
- vendor-src — C source from the Rockchip 5.10 vendor SDK
(
flare-edge/sdk/sysdrv/source/kernel/), forward-ported 5.10 → 6.18. - mainline-sibling — 6.18 mainline driver, extended with an rv1106 data table derived from a sibling SoC (rv1126/px30/rk3562) whose IP block matches.
- All Rockchip vendor kernel code is a GPL-2.0 fork of mainline Linux → GPL-clean.
Already-ported drivers (audited for openness per directive)
| Driver | Origin | License | Openness notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| clk-rv1106 (CRU) | vendor-src | GPL-2.0 | full register/PLL source; readable + hardenable |
| pinctrl-rockchip | vendor-src | GPL-2.0-only | rv1106 mux/drive tables in-source |
| rockchip_vop_reg VOP | mainline-sibling (rv1126) | GPL-2.0-only | data table only; no blob |
| phy-rockchip-inno-usb2 | mainline-sibling + vendor regs | GPL-2.0-or-later | rv1106_phy_cfgs from TRM/vendor |
| rockchip_saradc | mainline-sibling (v2) | GPL-2.0-or-later | 2-ch data table |
| rtc-rockchip | vendor-src | GPL-2.0 | whole driver, source |
| rockchip_thermal (tsadc) | vendor-src | GPL-2.0-only | rv1106 code-table + init from source |
| RGA (rga3/) | vendor-src | GPL-2.0 | full multicore 2D engine source |
In-flight
| Driver | Origin | License | Openness notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| AIC8800 wifi/BT | vendor-src (AICSemi) | MODULE_LICENSE("GPL") |
full full-MAC source; 50 files use GPL-only kernel/cfg80211/sdio symbols; no proprietary/redistribution restriction in-tree |
The one unavoidable blob — and why it is not kernel code
aic8800dc_fw(/oem/usr/ko/) is device firmware that the GPL host driver uploads to the wifi chip's on-die processor. It never runs on the A7; it is not linked into the kernel. This is the standard Linux firmware split (cf. every ath10k/mt76 device) and is the only binary in the wifi path — the driver itself is source. No open re-implementation of the AIC on-die MAC firmware exists; reverse-engineering it is out of scope for the panel and buys nothing (the host driver is where our control + hardening lives).
NPU — the openness line we will not cross
The kernel rknpu driver is portable GPL source (npu/PORT-PLAN.md). What is
closed is the userspace RKNN runtime + the regcmd stream format — a binary blob.
Per directive we do not ship that blob; if NPU compute is ever wanted, the open
path is a from-scratch/reverse-engineered regcmd encoder, tracked separately, never
a vendored binary runtime. (See npu/PORT-PLAN.md and the graphics investigation.)
Posture
Every kernel driver we run is source we hold. The only binaries in the whole enablement are on-device firmware (wifi chip), which by construction cannot be source on the host. That is the intended openness boundary: host = source, device-internal firmware = vendor blob, and no vendor binary is ever loaded into our kernel's address space.