08-22-2017, 09:02 AM
(08-22-2017, 08:04 AM)bitbank Wrote: Part of the reason I bought the Rock64 is to have a decent aarch64 system with more RAM and faster USB than some of my other ARM64 SBCs. Today while trying to build one of my projects, I discovered that the Linaro Linux distributed with the Rock64 has a 64-bit kernel, but 32-bit userland. This caused my build script to fail because uname returns only aarch64 as the system type. Besides this very disappointing news, so far, I've encountered the following issues with the board:
1) No SPI driver in current linux distribution
2) USB loses power and won't respond
3) Missing wifi drivers for my wifi dongles
4) Half of the GPIO header is unusable because it has conflicts or has been repurposed
What's the point of selling a 64-bit board that only runs 32-bit software? The Cortex-A53 is an old, slow ARM design and it's only benefit is that it supports the ARMv8 register model and instruction set. A new build of Linux can fix this 32/64-bit situation, but the other problems on my list will keep me from ever using it in projects. It looks like this board will join many others collecting dust in the desk drawer of shame.
/rant
The stock build has 32 bit user-land but the community builds come in both 32 and 64 bit variants.
As for issues, they are worked on - read what I responded to user radek in this thread (don't want to repeat myself).