Linux Seeing Support For Another ~$230 ARM Handheld Game Console

There's been no shortage of cheap, ARM-based handheld game consoles coming to market. Given Linux on Arm tending to work better than Windows and in keeping vendor costs to a minimum, they've tended to be running Linux or Android with various open-source games/emulators. Many of the vendors have kept their Linux support downstream while with time more of these gaming handheld consoles are seeing mainline Linux support. Yet another one being worked on for mainline Linux kernel support is the GameForce Ace.

The GameForce Ace is a ~$230 handheld gaming device using a Rockchip RK3588s SoC with four Cortex A76 cores and four Cortex A55 cores while having a Mali G610 GPU. The handheld is equipped with 8GB of LPDDR4 memory and 128GB of eMMC storage along with a TF card slot and M.2 NVMe support. This unit has a 5.5-inch 1080p IPS display. For $270 is also a model with 12GB of RAM.

More details on the GameForce Ace for those interested can be found at GameForce.Fun. Out of the box this device is running Android.

There's a set of patches currently being reviewed on the Linux kernel mailing list for adding support for the GameForce Ace. Just over 1.3k lines of new DeviceTree/YAML files are needed for getting this budget ARM handheld device running on the mainline kernel.