FriendlyELEC-Forum

I've seen references to using the mainline kernel on these boards

For example in the wiki: If you are using H3/H5/H2+ series board with mainline kernel, the easier way is using npi-config.
Or when I google around it seems like there's some discussion of this in the Armbian threads (https://forum.armbian.com/topic/8097-na ... on-review/).

What I haven't found is a howto guide for building mainline and booting on this board. Considering the Android-y configuration of the boot environment I would assume its not as straightforward of just building a 4.19 kernel and copying it over kernel.img ...

ericvh wrote:
I've seen references to using the mainline kernel on these boards

For example in the wiki: If you are using H3/H5/H2+ series board with mainline kernel, the easier way is using npi-config.
Or when I google around it seems like there's some discussion of this in the Armbian threads (https://forum.armbian.com/topic/8097-na ... on-review/).

What I haven't found is a howto guide for building mainline and booting on this board. Considering the Android-y configuration of the boot environment I would assume its not as straightforward of just building a 4.19 kernel and copying it over kernel.img ...

Vanilla mainline kernel (from kernel.org) for RK3399 is still months(a year) away, especially in some advanced functions, and switching is usually not this simple.

Most straightforward way is by using https://github.com/armbian/build to build an image with kernel 4.19 (DEV) for M4/T4. This is the best what exists for this board. It's development build which means no end user support and you need to add EXPERT="yes" parameter to get access for building this kernel.

Once you have Armbian booted, you can switch between both kernel by installing (from armbian repository) two .deb packages (linux-image and linux-dtb) from the kernel you want to use. Or use armbian-config which does that automatically.