I got a few questions at the Linux Plumbers Conference about various BeagleV Ahead development resources so I thought it would be good type it in a forum post:
Here is the out-of-the-box documentation: https://docs.beagleboard.org/latest/boards/beaglev/ahead/
One thing you may notice is that the board has a superspeed USB 3.0 micro B connector. We didn't do USB Type C as it would have required an additional mux chip and the project was already 1 year late. If you don't have a USB 3.0 superspeed micro B cable (like from an old USB 3.0 hard drive), then you still use a normal USB 2.0 micro B cable. I found USB 2.0 is still fast enough when flashing the eMMC to not be painful.
Another oddity is that the voltage translator circuitry for the console UART has some issues. This results in not all USB to UART adapters working. I use an inexpensive CP2102-based adapter that works. Here is how I wire it up: https://forum.beagleboard.org/t/beaglev-ahead-debug-terminal-problems/35331/3?u=drewfustini
All the repositories for hardware and software are under: https://git.beagleboard.org/beaglev-ahead
T-Head only officially supports v5.10 (see below for community upstreaming efforts): https://git.beagleboard.org/beaglev-ahead/beaglev-ahead-linux
We use their kernel for our Yocto and Ubuntu images in order to have full hardware support:
BeagleV-Ahead Yocto 2023-06-10 https://www.beagleboard.org/distros/beaglev-ahead-yocto-npi-2023-06-10
BeagleV-Ahead Ubuntu 2023-07-05 https://www.beagleboard.org/distros/beaglev-ahead-ubuntu-2023-07-05
We also have CI builds of both for users that want the latest (untested) images: https://git.beagleboard.org/beaglev-ahead/xuantie-yocto/-/artifacts https://git.beagleboard.org/beaglev-ahead/xuantie-ubuntu/-/artifacts
In terms of upstream, my mmc patch series has been applied by Ulf for 6.8: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20231114-th1520-mmc-v6-0-3273c661a571@baylibre.com/
This allows the BeagleV-Ahead to boot from the eMMC. Jisheng Zheng is another upstream developer that has been working a lot on the TH1520. Jisheng has patches in review for Ethernet, USB, PWM, and few more: https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=f%3Ajszhang%40kernel.org+th1520
I recently agreed with Jisheng to take on the clock driver because the previous person working on it stopped responding.
If you want to see the various th1520 patches on top of mainline, then a developer that uses nick Revy or Rabenda keeps a branch here: https://github.com/revyos/th1520-linux-kernel/tree/th1520-v6.7-rc1-v2
I idle in #beaglev on libera.chat but it is not very active. We do have an active beaglev-ahead channel on the BeagleBoard.org Discord chat server: https://discord.gg/7ebhDupV