Windows 10 ARM on Pinebook Pro?

[Luke]

Okay, so I contacted a few guys:

Hi Brent,

Thanks for reaching out. First of all, I think it would be awesome to support Windows on Arm on the RK3399-based Pinebook or on the whole lot of RK3399-based boards. More importantly, the Windows journey means finally bringing standards to the Rockchip ecosystem. You may have heard about the "Arm Server" hardware/firmware standards in the past, but what is really important is that these are no longer "server" standards. At the last Arm TechCon Arm announced that SBSA and SBBR compliance is the wave of the future for general-purpose OS support in any footprint. And even without Arm, we see /some/ adoption of at least UEFI and ACPI in the Windows on Arm laptops built with Qualcomm parts... And this is where I step back and point out that I work on the VMware ESXi/vSphere hypervisor for Arm, and so I'm actually very interested in having more-or-less standardized systems in the Edge footprint booting via UEFI+ACPI.

Anyway.

Yes, I did the full Pi 3 UEFI port - although it was based on a) some early code from Ard Biesheuvel (http://www.workofard.com/) and Microsoft's IoT 32-bit UEFI firmware for Pi 2/3. That code was subsequently upstreamed into edk2-platforms (https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms) by Pete Batard (http://akeo.ie/).

I do have a WiP Rk3399 UEFI firmware that I based off a tree that Pete has, although it's not seeing much work. It should work on many Rk3399 platforms (modulo GPIO, PMIC differences and the like), but it was developed against the FriendlyElect NanoPi-M4. I added rudimentary xHCI support to it (but it only works with USB2 devices or USB3 devices when isolating the USB3 pins, because I don't bring up the PHY) and enough ACPI to boot ESXi. Actually showed it running at the TechCon Expo in the Infrastructure Zone in the VMware booth.

The last thing I was working on (the firmware is a hobby really, but one I have very little time for) was HDMI support but it didn't seem to work (no valid HDMI signal... unclear if I am driving VOP or HDMI encoder correctly!).

Anyway - https://github.com/andreiw/rk3399-edk2 is the code, as-is. If you take this code, I do suggest doing the work in a way where it's upstreamed or upstreamable into edk2-platforms.

I definitely won't be able to commit to develop it for you. I can provide UEFI/ACPI guidance as appropriate, maybe do some commits that further my own goals, and even help bring you folks into Arm's efforts in supporting more "Edge hardware" under their "Project Cassini" (https://community.arm.com/developer/ip-p...f-the-edge, if that's interesting to you - or to Rockchip). Like I mentioned, I'd love myself to have a product-grade Rk3399-based platform for ESXi-Arm myself. I'm not a Rockchip expert myself and been lucky that Rockchip is the only company that actively releases their TRMs to general public.

So... who else could help here technically? I don't think there's a WoA community per se.
- Pete Batard, since it's his Tiano UEFI tree that I forked. Maybe he'll be interested. I CC'ed him.
- Rockchip? They ought to be interested in UEFI+ACPI firmware for their chips. Again, it's where the ecosystem is going for this class of chips anyway.
- Alexander Graf from Suse/U-boot? He added UEFI support to U-boot. So maybe you can get away with U-Boot instead of going to Tiano. Unfortunately there's still no ACPI support. I'm sure they were interested in adding support for booting Windows too, though.
- Ben (@imbushuo, https://www.imbushuo.net/) did all the amazing Qualcomm device support. Don't have his contacts beyond Twitter.
- Arm? Laptop aside, maybe they would like to invest into Rk3399 firmware as part of Project Cassini?

A

Hi Brent,

I'm afraid that just like Andrei, while I would really want to see
Windows 10 running on RK3399 boards, my time and probably my knowledge
of all the intrinsics required to produce a working UEFI firmware, are
too limited to see it as something I can be involved with at this stage.

Now, if you do happen to find an experienced group of developers willing
to invest the time and effort to produce a working firmware able to run
Windows or vanilla Linux distros (e.g. Debian ARM64) on RK3399, then I
would be happy to help with upstreaming effort into the official EDK2,
similarly to what I did with Andrei's RPI3 UEFI firmware. But I don't
think I'll have much scope to help with this endeavour beyond that.

The problem of course is that, unless you have a platform that is being
sold in large volume, such as the one seen with Raspberry Pi boards,
it's going to be difficult to find someone who has all of the expertise,
interest in the hardware, as well as free time, to complete such a
development.

Most likely, what may happen is that, just as I tried to pick the
initial UEFI pieces produced by Rockchip to play with it a little bit,
and then Andrei picked on that to add some more, you're going to have to
wait for a 3rd or 4th person to build on what we currently have in the
hope that they will get to finalize that work since most of the easily
identifiable people who might help probably have their hands full. Or as
Andrei pointed out, you can try to make a case to Rockchip that having a
RK3399 platform that runs a full Windows 10 could be a game changer,
though this might be a hard sale...

At any rate, I genuinely wish you all the luck in trying to get the
resources needed to complete a full RK3399 UEFI firmware port. Once
again, I'll be happy to help with the official upstreaming process if
you do manage to complete that. But that's about all I can see myself
being able to help with.

Regards,

/Pete

I do not think we have the basis ready for them to jump in?

I also contacted ARM. They want to have a call next week, to find out more about the details and whether it is UEFI or WoA that we/I want. However, since I do not know the details of this, I was wondering if it isn't better if they contact @Luke? I have the feeling this is getting a bit above my head Maybe I also just don't know what they expect.

Great job getting this rolling. Sure, I can join in on a call (granted its not scheduled for middle of the night for me), but I am afraid that my technical skills are that of a baboon with a wrench. In other words, I think that you'd probably want someone like @Mrfixit2001,  or @xalius or @ayufan on the call too. PM me in Discord or on Telegram please? (IRC too - but there I can accidentally miss your PM).