02-23-2019, 11:48 AM
mentaluproar - not a stupid question at all 
The 4.4 kernel is rockchip's board-specific breed, and has a lot of special tweaks which make it optimized for their platform. Mainline's compatibility isn't quite there yet, but continues to get better every day. It's important to differentiate the difference between "compatible" and "bootable". There's many features that just haven't made it to mainline yet. But again, that will improve in time. For now, I've chosen to take mainline improvements and backport them to the 4.4 kernel in order to provide the most optimized experience I'm able to. This is especially important with features like hardware acceleration. The kernel in this build is optimized for media and emulation, altho obviously can be utilized for many other things such as desktops.
The 4.4 kernel is rockchip's board-specific breed, and has a lot of special tweaks which make it optimized for their platform. Mainline's compatibility isn't quite there yet, but continues to get better every day. It's important to differentiate the difference between "compatible" and "bootable". There's many features that just haven't made it to mainline yet. But again, that will improve in time. For now, I've chosen to take mainline improvements and backport them to the 4.4 kernel in order to provide the most optimized experience I'm able to. This is especially important with features like hardware acceleration. The kernel in this build is optimized for media and emulation, altho obviously can be utilized for many other things such as desktops.