Doogee U10 tablet runs Debian 12 from SD card via reverse-engineered RK3562 port

A developer reverse-engineered the Rockchip RK3562-based Doogee U10, an $80 Android tablet, to boot full Debian 12 Bookworm from an SD card without unlocking the bootloader or touching internal eMMC storage. Pulling the card returns the device to stock Android, making the conversion fully reversible. The build system, rkdebian, produces U-Boot, kernel, and Debian rootfs artifacts on an x86-64 host and was assembled with no vendor BSP or documentation, leaning on Firefly’s open-source RK3562 repositories plus AI assistants (Claude, Codex, Gemini-based Antigravity) to fill the gaps.

The port goes beyond a basic Linux shell. It supports local LLM inference on the RK3562’s single NPU core via Rockchip’s RKLLM stack with W8A8 quantization — Qwen3-0.6B notably outperforms Qwen2.5-1.5B in warm-run benchmarks. Phosh runs on either Mesa/Panfrost or Mali GPU stacks, with power-profile syncing to cpufreq, a long-press power-key policy, orientation-preserving lockscreen, and a flashlight LED wired into the Phosh torch icon. Cameras work with imperfect color calibration, and a battery gauge service patches a known 0% misreport after extended power-off.

Notable engineering touches include a session failsafe timer that auto-rolls back broken desktop sessions five minutes after boot, and an on-device update mechanism that consumes signed tarballs from an inbox directory and reboots to apply rootfs and boot payloads — avoiding full SD reflashes. The project demonstrates how cheap Android hardware plus AI-assisted reverse engineering is collapsing the barrier to hobbyist Linux ports.