Rock64 Review

[MarkHaysHarris777]

As a person interested in firmware development, it's so nice to see that Rock64 features SPI NOR flash. But I have a suggestion in this respect. 16MB is huge, even more than needed. This way you only encourage fw writers to do bloatware.) seriously, I think it would be even cooler to put 2 smaller SPI NOR flash chips, say not bigger than 2MB each. instead of this huge one. For reliability. x86 motherboards often do this way. It's a practice. Also eMMC has 2 boot "partitions" for the same reason in the standard. It would be more reliable to have 2 discrete firmware devices than to have 2 copies of the fw on the same bigger device. Is it possible with rk3328? I think yes. maybe for later revisions of the board? Installing there an OS is a bad idea, better is using network boot if local storage is not an option. NOR is for firmware and having 2MB is way enough. but for the longevity, better to have 2 such chips on board. just a thought.

They're way ahead of you...  


...  the SPI flash is partitioned in the mtd subsystem:  The entire SPI flash is represented (stubbed in) as several devices as follows (from cat /proc/mtd):

/dev/mtd0:    00008000   "system"
/dev/mtd1:    003f8000    "loader"
/dev/mtd2:    003c0000    "reserved"
/dev/mtd3:    00040000    "vendor"
/dev/mtd4:    00400000    "uboot"
/dev/mtd5:    00400000    "atf"

All of the above is subject to change.  "system" is stubbed.  "vendor" is being used now to keep mac addys persistent.  "uboot" is obvious,  and "atf"  is arm trusted firmware.

These partitions are being stubbed in now in preparation for booting from the on-board SPI flash.  Stay tuned here and on the irc for the ongoing discussions regarding how these partitions will change in the future; as well the future of booting from SPI flash.

( hint:  only one relatively large chip is needed;  although, the SPI nor flash is relatively tiny ! )