Up to RK33xx, the VPU is well supported by the mainline Linux Hantro driver.
For RK356x, where we ship images with mainline Linux as well, we get mixed feedback, but H264 should work. There are or were quite some patches offered upstream to extend features/support, but AFAIK H265 is still missing, not sure about the status of JPEG and VP9.
PINE64 provides some contradicting status info:
Maybe better check source code of the driver for hints:
- Our
currentbranch based on Linux 6.12: Making sure you're not a bot! - Our
edgebranch based on Linux 6.16: Making sure you're not a bot!
In any case, the driver provides a different API, not the Rockchip MPP, so software needs to support it as well.
For RK3588, while there are bits and pieces in the mainline driver already, AFAIK it is not well supported yet. Our images for those boards however ship with vendor kernel based on Rockchip Linux 6.1, hence with Rockchip MPP driver. This kernel can be generally also installed on RK356x SBCs, but so far we have not added it to our APT repo for those, and I am hesitating to make this legacy Linux version prominently available. But you can find the packages with vendor-rk35xx suffix here: Index of /downloads/binaries
- Always install both,
image+dtbpackages. - There might be some cases where mainline Linux does not boot with vendor U-Boot vice versa, depends on exact SBC, so to be safe, find the
u-boot-...-vendorpackage as well, and flash that U-Boot viadietpi-configadvanced options.