Arch Linux on RockPro64

[oreggin]

Well,

development in the mainline Linux kernel has advanced quite far, so there is a device tree supporting the RockPro64 in mainline Linux. With 5.3-rc7, the PCIe is also working, so I just installed the linux-aarch64-rc package from archlinuxarm and my rockpro runs flawlessly since then. Booting still takes couple of minutes longer than with Ayufans images.

My status update:
I compiled kernel from mainline source and it works fine without initrd. Up to v5.1.x boot time is less than 30sec. My rootfs is btrfs with compression.
From v5.2 there is a 60sec stall in booting process but no errors. Alarm "stable" kernel now v5.3.1 hangs with soft lookup:

Code:

[   66.702492] clocksource: Switched to clocksource arch_sys_counter
[   92.192292] watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#4 stuck for 22s! [swapper/0:1]
[   92.193145] Modules linked in:
[   92.193964] CPU: 4 PID: 1 Comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 5.3.1-1-ARCH #1
[   92.194612] Hardware name: Pine64 RockPro64 (DT)
[   92.195311] pstate: 60000005 (nZCv daif -PAN -UAO)
[   92.196168] pc : trace_event_eval_update+0x2fc/0x330
[   92.196833] lr : trace_event_eval_update+0x138/0x330
[   92.197373] sp : ffff00001004bce0
[   92.197874] x29: ffff00001004bce0 x28: 0000000000000000
[   92.198677] x27: ffff000011761610 x26: ffff000011836268
[   92.199395] x25: ffff00001112ba38 x24: 00000000000000e8
[   92.200089] x23: 0000000000000018 x22: ffff0000116a3310
[   92.200771] x21: 0000000000000224 x20: 000000000000014d
[   92.201443] x19: ffff000011822161 x18: 0000000000000001
[   92.202114] x17: 000000006898f49a x16: 00000000ea2169b9
[   92.202787] x15: 2d20377b1910031c x14: ff00000000000000
[   92.203456] x13: 0000000000000001 x12: 0000000000000007
[   92.204125] x11: 0101010101010101 x10: 0000000000000018
[   92.204788] x9 : 0000000000000003 x8 : 0000000000000008
[   92.205459] x7 : 1c0310197b37202d x6 : 2d20377b1910031c
[   92.206114] x5 : 0000000000000000 x4 : 0000000000000052
[   92.206760] x3 : 0000000000000002 x2 : ffff00001182214b
[   92.207410] x1 : 0000000000000010 x0 : 0000000000000000
[   92.208060] Call trace:
[   92.208709]  trace_event_eval_update+0x2fc/0x330
[   92.209539]  tracer_init_tracefs+0x178/0x214
[   92.210224]  do_one_initcall+0x54/0x220
[   92.210833]  kernel_init_freeable+0x28c/0x334
[   92.211557]  kernel_init+0x18/0x104
[   92.212185]  ret_from_fork+0x10/0x1c
[  108.631342] VFS: Disk quotas dquot_6.6.0

The final boot time is around 300sec. It is terrible.

I also tried mainline uboot with rkbin git, but rkbin goes crazy and prints unbelivable frequencies (854MHz) under dram init so I falled back to ayufans uboot as latest rkbin made my board unstable and it continously rebooting after some load.