Hello,

I have been tinkering with my RockPro64 in the last few days, and as I have Arch Linux running on almost every computer in my home (unfortunately I could not find a port for my router), I was also looking into the possibility to bring a preferably vanilla Arch Linux to the RockPro64. I especially like this as this gives me the opportunity to use the precompiled packages from the Arch Linux ARM community and thus have a nice and up-to-date package source.

This also promised to be a good opportunity for me to learn how images for such embedded boards can be created, as I have never done such a thing before.

What I tried:
There is an official Arch Linux image for the Rock64 on the Arch Linux ARM webpage, on top of that there is a somewhat ambiguous description in a forum on how Arch Linux can be ported to Rock64: https://me.m01.eu/blog/2017/12/rock64-arch-linux/
This basically combines the projects of Ayufan to compile u-boot and the arm-trusted-firmware packages, creates an image with guestfish in the format required by RockChip and extracts the stock ARMv8 Arch Linux ARM image into the /root partition.


My idea was that this project could nicely be used as the starting point for my idea, as I hoped to be able to just replace every occurence of Rock64 with RockPro64 in the configuration files. Unfortunately this turned out to be harder than expected (what doesn't if you are compiling your own images?). I fought quite a lot with the strange curiosity that aarch64-linux-gnu- threw all kinds of errors when compiling u-boot under my arch build machine, but compiled nicely when under a debian host... Opposite was the behavior of guestfish, that only wanted to work under arch linux. Nevertheless, this failed as the created image simply refused to boot for some reason. I have to admit though that I still did not really understand, what the build scripts do and where it all pulls files from Ayufans compiled results. I also had problems to understand what Ayufan did in the configuration of u-boot for example (I also could not figure out yet where the compiled files from arm-trusted-firmware are ever used) but that can well have its reason in my inexperience. His images work, so he must have done some awesome magic.

So, after some frustration I had a dirty backup plan:
I just burned Ayufans latest Debian Stretch image to my SD card and then deleted everything on / except /boot. After that I extracted everything but the boot folder from the Arch Linux ARM file onto / on the SD card.

I don't have to say, my surprise was huge as this image suddenly booted on my RockPro64. After doing an initialisation of pacman and a first package update, I noticed that Arch Linux suggested to update my kernel from 4.4 to 4.17. I thought this will happen as Ayufans Stretch images incorporate the rockchip custom 4.4 kernel. Anyways I hit the update. To my fortune the stock Arch Linux kernel is called "Image" with "initramfs-linux.img" as the init system, so instead of overwriting Ayufans kernel it just packed the stock one next to it. Then I only had to add an other entry to /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf before the entries of Ayufan to use the stock kernel and now my RockPro64 is running vanilla Arch Linux ARM!

However, this is only a first test and proof-of-concept, so there are some drawbacks:
u-boot will never be upgraded in this constellation as arch linux simply does not know that there is u-boot installed on the system and there is also no package in the sources that it could use for an upgrade. Also, I did not get my HDMI monitor to work yet (but as I plan to use my RockPro as a headless server I don't care about that very much). I will also have to look to get PCIe working form my SATA card.

But still, I have a vanilla Arch Linux running on my machine.  I know, it was a very dirty way of getting it to run, but I will need to read more in the rockchip wiki on compiling linux and creating images to finally get this to work the traditional way... Is there anyone with interest to port Arch Linux to the RockPro with a little experience in linux and u-boot and image creation?

Greetings

Hi,

Been playing with the bionic-lxde-rockpro64-0.7.8-1061-arm64 image, the desktop experience is very good, really usable. There is one problem tho, YouTube and BBC iPlayer run a 4 time the normal speed. Any idea how to fix?

Hi

My RockPro64 arrived last week and it looks good so far. But I have a little problem, I tried a Intel I350 T4 4 port gigabit nic on the PCIe slot and it doesn't work...
I'm running stretch minimal from ayufan (stretch-minimal-rockpro64-0.7.8-1061-arm64). In my computer (fedora) and in my server (centos) the nic works fine.

It does show up with lspci:

In 9 hours 34 minutes.  Several sites I visit whine about my browser version using what's in the debs, Badoo refuses to work at all.  So I've tried a few times to build current Firefox.  This was done from an hg bundle because it was the only thing I could pull through intact enough to work.  It's about 1.5 GB of source code, the build directory at the end is 5.9 GB.  This is a 4 GB Rock64 with a 6 GB swapfile.

Rust and LLVM/Clang I had to build from sources because the deb versions were too old (rustup update will work for Rust), everything else is from the debs.  LLVM documentation has a lot of old cruft in it.  But unxz and untar both llvm and cfe (clang).  Then inside the llvm dir make a tools/clang dir and move the contents of the clang tarball into it (skip the outer level directory).  That way building and installing llvm will also do clang.  You have to use cmake, not the configure script, so do mkdir build and cd into that, then "cmake ..".  Edit your new CMKakeCache.txt and put in TOP_LEVEL_DIR=/usr/local/llvm (or wherever you want LLVM installed) then run "cmake .." again.  Now run make and make install.  I'm just doing it over  again on a Pi [that didn't work].

There's a list of requirements, I kept working through that and tracking things down from error messages.  There's a bootstrap.py in there somewhere, that helped a little but in the end ./mach build ran straight through.  I started with a tarball, I forget why that didn't work.  Then I tried to use git, but that only works on perfect networks, so I did the bundle.   All the attempts helped me get the requirements right.  I grabbed from https://hg.cdn.mozilla.net/ using the releases/mozilla-release at the bottom.  I mostly followed https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs...al/Bundles but I didn't do mozilla-central (this time).

   

I'm just playing here looking to get more bandwidth.....
Anyone know if adding a 2/4 port gigabit pcie card using a Intel pro 1000 chipset and binding the interfaces together would work?
IE would the rockpro64 allow the bandwidth through or would there be a bottleneck that wouldn't make it worth it?
Thanks
Neeko

Hi,

I've purchased the ROCKPro64 PCI-e to Dual SATA-II Interface Card and would like to know on how to provide power to the drives. Got to admit that I did not really look at the pictures before purchasing, so I thought there would be a sata power connector run of the PCI v12 lane

Any guidance would be gratefully received...

Thought I would log a confirmation it is perfectly possible to setup a new ROCKPro64 with linux without:

1) etcher (or the Pine utility) - there is no aarch64 version of etcher which is kinda limiting for those of us already using arm systems for our daily driver!
2) I didn't order the Pine emmc/USB adapter to save money and reduce the order value/import tax hit.

The steps are pretty simple: yeah they rely on dd heavily and most of the time it works fine for me.

1) Download your image of choice, I went with bionic-minimal-rockpro64-0.7.9-1067-arm64.img.xz
2) Unzip the image,

HI all,

The Pinebook BTO page will be updated on August 1st and new Pinebook shipments will follow sometime soon after that.

Which leads me to my question: which OS would you like the new Pinebook batch to ship with? - please answer the poll.
If you have other suggestions then we're all ears ...

Thanks!

Hi,

Can someone confirm the pins on the PI-1 bus for UART and the COM port setting, I assumed it was the same as the Rock64, but this is not working for me

Hi Guys,

I just received my ROCKPRO64, but I have severe problems to get it to boot.
I prepared a SD card using the PINE64 Intaller, I have tried various OS offerings, Linux, Android, etc.
But none of them seem to boot the RockPro64.
The power supply is perfectly fine, it is capable if providing 12V@4A.
I even tried another power supply, same effect.
The board seems to be supplied, at the GPIO connector I can measure 5V as well as 3.3V.
The Ethernet LEDs are blinking if I plugin a network cable.
The Power button seems also to shut down the board if I press long enought (Ethernet LEDs turn off),
and by pressing the Power Button the Ethernet LED turn back on.
But under no circumstances I get a video out on HDMI, not can I see that the board has requested
a IP address.
So, it looks like as if the board is not booting from SD card at all.

Unfortunately I forgot to order an eMMC card as well, so I cannot check whether it boots from eMMC.

I placed already an order, but I have to wait a few more days for the eMMC card to arrive.

Is ther a special trick to get the board booted from SD card?
If there any other way I could check whether the board is atcually working, booting from USB maybe?

Any help would be highly appreciated.

Thx
Daniel