I think that the TH1520 in the Beagle-V and Lichee Pi 4A only has support for 5.10 kernel (curently) at least for access to most of the features of the SoC. If you do not mind loosing access to most features of the SoC, then you can run any kernel. An example what you would loose access to with any other kernel would be GUI support, and the ability for the VPU to encode/decode video. But there are many many more (For now, hopefully they will upstream support).
Plug "site:lore.kernel.org TH1520" into your search engine of choice to see what hardware is in the process of being upstreamed to the bleeding edge Linux kernel-next. Which is probably about a year away from being in a longterm suported Linux kernel.
I totally agree, BUT (there is always a but) a fully open boot process is also fully open for maliciousness.
e.g. With full access to all hardware you could tell the PMIC (Power Management IC) to output the maximum voltage for some pins to permanently damage/destroy the SoC or other hardware on the board. This would also require that the hardware being damaged is also under-clocked for maximum effectiveness.
I love that I have full access to all the hardware, but I always keep in mind that the second that I run other peoples software on my hardware it always opens the possibility that it is no longer my hardware.
Plug "site:lore.kernel.org TH1520" into your search engine of choice to see what hardware is in the process of being upstreamed to the bleeding edge Linux kernel-next. Which is probably about a year away from being in a longterm suported Linux kernel.
ref: https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/blob/master/Result...