Lichee Pi 4A RISC-V Desktop Gets Unboxed, Offers Strong Linux Performance

As with all of these types of boards, it ships with some oddball u-boot bsp version, and from what I can tell upstream efforts for u-boot are going slowly (https://lore.kernel.org/u-boot/?q=lichee). YMMV. If you want to play ball with the shipping LicheePi4A bsp u-boot, you have to specially put firmware bins in /boot so that u-boot can slurp em and load em.

Contrasted with VF2 which appears to maybe even now be bootable from upstream u-boot with NVME. Something not even yet true of Rock5B from Collabora's "hardware-enablement" repos. (https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...)

I'm supposed to be forgetting this. Maybe passing on the trauma is my way of healing.

Something I am (why, someone stop me?) curious about is the differences in toolchains used. I've seen it reported in several places now that stock GCC produces noticeably inferior code to the optimized th1520 toolchain. Is that going to change/be upstreamed/ etc?

"4x USB 3.0 Type-A, 1x USB 2.0 Type-C" Why do manufacturers do this? At this point USB 2 is legacy and type A too and they manage to mix the 2 in the worst combo possible...