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.