Last year, I picked up a new ayn Odin gaming handheld, and ended up working on installing Linux on it (regular Linux, not Android). I thought the process and things I learned during it would make for some good blog posts, so part of the way through the process I started writing down what I was doing, in the hope it would be interesting to others when published. This post will be the first in a series hopefully following the journey in getting full, or at least workable, support for it in upstream Linux so that anyone can install Linux on their Odin device and keep it up to date with the latest emulators, graphics drivers and so on.

Recently I’ve been following progress on support for the Rockchip RK3588 System-on-Chip in mainline Linux. I have been using a RockPRO64 single-board computer based on Rockchip’s previous top-end SoC RK3399 for several years as a media centre running Kodi, on Debian with a mainline Linux kernel (plus some patches for improved multimedia support from the LibreELEC project).

I’ve been pretty satisfied with the support for RK3399 in mainline Linux, as opposed to a vendor BSP based on an old kernel like 4.4. The good level of upstream support is partly due to the fact the RK3399 was used in several Chromebook devices, and thanks to Chromium OS’s “Upstream First” policy they contributed a large amount of support for the RK3399 in the open source projects used in Chromium OS, most importantly Coreboot, ARM Trusted Firmware and the Linux kernel.

This weekend I figured out how to set up multipath routing with Oracle Cloud’s Site-to-Site VPN. I have been using Oracle Cloud for a while as they have a generous “Always Free” plan for their 64-bit ARM virtual servers. To create a site-to-site connection between my home network and the Oracle Cloud network, I use their IPSec Site-to-Site VPN service. This type of VPN is made up of two IPSec tunnels, with different endpoints on the Oracle side, though strangely you can only specify one IP address for the endpoint on your side of the tunnels - Oracle calls this the Customer Premises Equipment or CPE. But in any case, the idea is you establish two tunnels to Oracle for redundancy, even though they both go to one endpoint on the “customer premises”.